The Guardian view on spoken word poets: powerful voices that are needed today
News that one of the UK’s leading poetry prizes is introducing a category for spoken word artists is as welcome as it is overdue. The move by the Forward prizes signals that the poetry establishment is finally finding a way to honour a sector that it has traditionally regarded as a cuckoo in its nest, when in fact it has long been a fully fledged skylark. This prejudice has done poetry itself no favours, by excluding not only some of the most powerful voices of the last half century, but also those most likely to draw big new audiences into its thrall.
For three decades, the Forward prizes have stood alongside the TS Eliot awards as proof that poetry still matters. Each year, both sets of awards fill London’s 2,700-seater Festival Hall for winners’ ceremonies that are also performances, celebrating the art form in its most ancient iteration as something to be heard and shared. In this context, it has always seemed ironic that it has had no room for the cultureshifting polemics of, say, Linton Kwesi Johnson or Benjamin Zephaniah, or of a younger generation who, like George the Poet, are capable of reeling in a Glastonbury crowd.
This is not to deny that the Forward prizes’ existing portfolio of best collection, best single poem and best debut collection has built up a formidable library of winners over the last 31 years. They stretch from Thom Gunn’s great Aids era memorial, The Man with Night Sweats, to Kim Moore’s zeitgeisty poems of everyday sexism, All the Men
I Never Married, and include works by three poet laureates.
It would also be wrong to claim that there is a complete separation between poetry for page and stage: after all, one of this year’s Forward judges, Joelle Taylor, is a former UK slam champion who last year won the TS Eliot prize. This raises the question of whether it is necessary, or even desirable, to create a spoken word niche at all today, or if it is just a matter of waiting until poets who found their voice on the spoken word scene, such as Ms Taylor, or 2020’s TS Eliot winner, Roger Robinson, are ready to commit their words to print.
But to make that argument is to assume that there is a hierarchy – a growing-up process – when in fact there are plenty of poets who work simultaneously in both arenas. As Ms Taylor rightly pointed out: “Spoken word and performed poetry is as valuable, dynamic and exploratory as published works.” Though it is intrinsic to the very nature of oral poetry that it has a light archival footprint, it nevertheless has a long pedigree. That lineage stretches back to the Harlem renaissance via the 1960s, when Beat heavyweights such as Allen Ginsberg electrified a 7,000strong audience at the Royal Albert Hall, and Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten emerged as the Liverpool Poets.
That some of the cultural and political excitement of poetry in that reformative era has resurfaced in the last few years is largely due to public performance, from Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb, which stole the hearts of millions at the inauguration of Joe Biden, to Kae Tempest’s redefinition of the relationship between poetry, music and theatre. A new mechanism for bringing this energy into the classical canon, holding it in parallel and capturing it for posterity, can only be enriching.