the great leap forward revisited

horsemouth remembers his friend  dave 'mr. social control' denouncing the slam poetry end of performance poetry as 'happy-clappy'. 

horsemouth thinks he's right.  'form deforms' as witold gombrowicz puts it.

there is a depth to the best poetry that affirmation and annunciation cannot give you. I think it is just there in the distance between the poet's act of writing and the individual's reading or the audience's hearing.

but horsemouth thinks that even writing for performance, for an audience already closes down or weakens the effect that writing for an imagined solitary reader in communion with the text can bring.

the weight of words that are designed to be read out loud and those that are intended to be read in silence by solitary readers is different. many of the poets that we are used to reading gave live performances of their work true but poetry has become something that is read in silence and not performed. 

back in the days ranting poets (aka. spoken word), much as comedians, singer songwriters  and music hall acts, would pad the bills of comedy nights, open mics and cabaret nights. 

but then came hip-hop. practices of talk-over went mainstream. it took a while before everyone could do it (but that happened).  

at his/her/their best kae/ kate tempest can really do it and opens up an interesting space between MCing (an improvisatory art of spoken word) and (er. 'actual poetry') poetry. this is a fleeting moment between the two genres however and I doubt there will be many people who can follow them (horsemouth has checked the pronouns) into that space to any good effect. 

krs-one claimed to be a philosopher and to write poetry but his main innovation was to be able to freestyle - to just make it up off the top of his head. 

kae's book (for example - and this is where they will ultimately go, into books, plays and TV) didn't do it for horsemouth because it was written in that breathless 'how to' manual mode that all books are now written in -  chopped together from social media posts, copy-pasted in word processing software.

horsemouth would include my own 'writing' in that condemnation - he is for instance currently copying this (a response to a social media post) into a blog post (and fine-tuning it as he goes along). 

it all begins (horsemouth tends to think) with the call and response of sermons and the extension of that into a dialogic negotiation of the material with the audience. this is a heresy brought into music, song and dance over the western view of through composed music, set lyrics, formal dances - and it is an incredibly fruitful heresy.

what horsemouth is interested in doing is complicating the story of improvisation - shifting it from magical goodness and fountain of creativity to strategy of late capitalism. there is no money to train the workers in the new software, they must teach themselves etc. it is the great reset/ the great leap forward revisited.

here we are having this discussion on social media (instead of getting on with writing our albums). social media we will all entertain each other for free. 

of course there is an adornoian pessimistic cast to horsemouth's thoughts - but horsemouth, in himself, is a cosmic sentimentalist, he is distinctly happy clappy. 

today horsemouth journeys back to the green. (hopefully there will be a lift waiting for him at the other end)