Ed note: This week we're featuring a guest post from writer Derek White. Derek's post considers something I've been thinking about a lot lately: how do we determine whether a poet is a "proper poet" or "professional poet"? What differentiates those "formal" poets from the "amateurs": money, talent, publications, experience, how they market themselves? Derek's post explores … Continue reading Guest Post: What is a “Proper Poet”?
Month: June 2015
Launching my Kickstarter!
A different kind of post on the website this week . . . I have a major announcement about my own creative work. As I wrote last week, performance poetry allows fantastic engagement with a live audience, but few tangible products for the audience to purchase after the show. The poet might perform a brilliant set, … Continue reading Launching my Kickstarter!
To Publish or Not to Publish Performance Poetry
Being a performance poet means fantastic live exposure: one can interact with the audience, contextualise poems through between-poem chat, adapt the set for the setting, etc. However, as great as this physical exposure and audience engagement is, performance poetry as a genre also carries with it the drawback that it is ultimately ephemeral. The audience may love your work, but at … Continue reading To Publish or Not to Publish Performance Poetry
Halah Mohammed has posted the second part of our interview on her blog: read here!
Part 2
“How has your journey been with the Fulbright?”
“There is something really interesting about being an outsider and deeply studying an art form of another culture. I’m not looking at really established artists. I’m looking at people who have different day jobs and are doing poetry on the side because they love doing it. Also, performance poetry hasn’t gotten a lot of traction in academia yet. Partially because it’s new and because it’s perceived as low-brow art. I understand where that perception comes from but I still think performance poetry deserves more critical attention.
I’ve been welcomed (into Scotland) completely. I’ve never felt the sense of ‘what are you doing here?’ or ‘You’re from the States so you can’t perform at our Open-Mics!”. It’s never been that way at all. For me as an academic and an artist it’s been really good to have a dual identity because…
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Touring with Loud Poets: Reflections
This site has been rather quiet for the past couple weeks, but for a good reason: I've been touring with the Loud Poets in London and at the Brighton Fringe Festival! They had me along as a guest poet on their show, a techie, flyerer, and social media manager, among other roles everyone played as … Continue reading Touring with Loud Poets: Reflections
Katie Ailes 