Of Apples and Snakes

Poetry - seen as stuffy, obscure, unfun - badly needs a makeover to reach a wider audience. Teachers dissect it and exams kill it. How many people open a book and read for pleasure? (Remember Daisy Goodwin's comments?)

Well, in Britain there's been a small revolution. It's called performance poetry. And at the heart of performance poetry, there is an organisation called Apples and Snakes. (So named because they began in a pub called The Adam and Eve.) From humble begining with just three poets and a London base, it now has 15 poets on its payroll and organises events across Britain ... and in India ... and soon ...

Well, don't let me get ahead of myself.

Performance poetry is poetry written to be ... performed (rather than stuffily mumbled by some arty-type, nose glued to a sheet of paper). It has to be immediate 'cos an audience can't spend time puzzling out deeper meanings, while rhythm and wordsound is even more important. It easily incorporates elements of stand-up comedy, theatre and music. It can be performed in any public space - even on buses and in the supermarket ...

And it can be performed by ... anybody ...

(Shock horror gasp from the purists.)

My first brush with performance poetry was last November when Sunitha (of British Council) and I attended a regional Animating Literature workshop in Manila to look at ways of promoting reading and writing in South-East Asia.

Apples and Snakes poet, Francesca Beard, lead some of the sessions - performed her work for us (quite wonderful), took us through writing and performing pieces ...

And she also worked with a group of university students who put on an excellent performance of their work one evening at the Conspiracy Bar with Francesca performing several of her piece! It was all woven together with traditional dance and music and vocal performance. Siege, who drops by this blog sometimes was one of the performers and besides reading his own work, performed quite an amazing duel of words in tagalog with a friend.

So where is this going?

Apples and Snakes director Geraldine Collinge (left) is in town and working out with British Council and local poets how performance poetry can best be brought to Malaysia and a generation of performance poets trained up ... to perform of course, and then to train others, perhaps going into schools and colleges. To start something big and self-sustaining and fun from an apple pip and snake scale.

Lat night the British Council held a reception for Geraldine at Maya Gallery in Bangsar and local poets Jerome Kugan, Bernice Chauly, and Datuk Shan read their poetry ...