JOHN BURNS is a poet and loves poetry, but hes not happy about the state of the art. John challenges his fellow poets to grasp the challenge of writing for the world we now live in, or join Willie the hamster at the bottom of the garden.

POETRY IS DEAD. It is time we all accepted that and stopped dragging a corpse around with us. Lets stop wasting everyones time and just bury it at the bottom of the garden, next to Willy the hamster who had an unfortunate encounter with next door’s cat.

Okay so I exaggerate, poetry isnt quite dead, but it is on life support and if we switched off the machine it couldnt breathe unaided. If you dont believe me, try and get an audience for a performance poet or find the poetry section in a station bookshop.

Ask a few folk who the poet laureate is, the current heavyweight champ of verse, and theyll look at you with blank incomprehension. That question could get you the big one on “Who wants to be a millionaire?”

I remember when I first saw a real performance poet. I was seventeen and living in Merseyside. One evening I caught the old ferry across the murky waters of the Mersey and walked up through the shabby streets of Liverpool to the Everyman theatre. There I entered a strange and fascinating world, populated by young men and women clad in cheesecloth and blue denim, the air permeated by the smell of an unusual brand of herbal tobacco.

I fitted in completely, my long dark hair falling over the collar of a vast army great coat and just enough money for one pint of cider in the theatre bar. The lights dimmed and a trembling young man, his head a mass of thick curls, walked slowly on to the stage where he mesmerised the audience with his rare and captivating imagery.

I didnt know it then but I was privileged, for this was a young Brian Patten, who was then and still is one of the best romantic poets of a generation. Along with Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, collectively known as the Merseybeat poets, he championed a revival of poetry on Merseyside that has left a lasting legacy.

That was a long time ago, the army great coat and, alas, my flowing dark hair, have long since gone but what has remained with me is an abiding love of poetry. Why then would I want to lay poetry to rest?

I suppose there are a number of reasons and they all have to do with my own experience of writing and performing poetry over the last few years. It was over twenty years later that I came back to poetry and began writing myself. I began writing, as many do, during a time of personal crisis when it gave me a way of expressing the feelings I had and, by putting them into words, understanding them better.

As I began to explore the world of poetry once more I became increasingly disillusioned with what I found. Far from the vibrant and exciting art form I expected to find, the poetry I have encountered seems to me to be languishing in a cultural backwater.

In the general population few people would give it the time of day. Poetry now only survives in a few dull rooms populated by a handful of devotees and in the pages of magazines and pamphlets read by the same people and that, unless we do things very differently, is where it will remain until eventually it fades into even greater obscurity.

I think I can lay some claim to having tried to change that in the Highlands. I established Mad Poets Society, a small group of poets and storytellers, and we performed on a regular basis in Blackfriars bar in Inverness. We have raised the profile of poetry and storytelling in the Highland capital to some degree.

Our greatest claim to fame was getting poets Jim Paterson, John Miller and Lilian Ross on the stage of Eden Court theatre, along with storyteller Andy Macintosh, in support of Fred MacAulay during the Highland Festival 2003. Despite some success, audiences have remained small and there has not been the response I had hoped for.

I think that has more to do with the general state of health of poetry throughout the UK rather than any specific issues concerning the Highlands. This has made me think about the part poetry plays in the culture of today and to doubt that poetry, either written or performed, has any role in the mainstream.

Why has this happened and why is the future of poetry so bleak? One reason is that audiences have changed. Where once people would travel great distances to see a good poet they now have the option of watching Arnold Schwarzenegger mow down half the population of a distant galaxy on their DVD without even having to rise from the armchair.

Listening to poetry requires the audience to participate in the experience, to meet the poet half way, and this is something the majority of the population is unfamiliar with. Although the change in peoples understanding and expectation of entertainment since the impact of movies and TV is one reason for the decline of poetry, I dont think it is the principle reason.

I think the main reason is that poets have become lazy in both what they write and how they perform. One example of this is that rhyming poetry has become unfashionable. When I began writing poetry I wrote what is called free verse. That is poetry without any particular rhyme, meter or rhythm, and its what youll see in the majority of modern poems.

I couldnt see the point of bothering with the complexities and headaches surrounding anything other than free verse. It was only when I began to perform regularly and read my poems to an audience that I realised why the sound of what you write is so important. A poem that has a rhyming scheme or has a rhythm will have far greater impact when performed to a live audience than free verse.

By ignoring the technicalities of poetry most poets deaden their art. I am no musician but it is a bit like trying to become a concert pianist without bothering to learn the scales. The American poet Robert Frost said that writing free verse is a little like playing tennis with the net down.

Apart from what a poem sounds like, there is another reason why the technical side of poetry is important. If you are struggling to find a rhyme it is likely you will be stretched beyond what you would normally write in free verse. You may find a word that gives greater meaning to your work and takes the poem somewhere it would not otherwise go. This is the “dark art” of poetry, these “mysteries” are what takes poetry beyond prose or normal speech, without them poetry lacks its most potent magic.

I hate the term “poetry reading” because it implies that you simply read the words off the page when you perform a poem. Nothing, in my view, could be further from the truth. One of the few ways a writer can have direct contact with his audience and develop a relationship with them through his work is by performing his poems. Yet performing poetry is another area that in which I think poets let themselves and their art down.

When I was at University I once persuaded a group of fellow students to abstain from the cheap beer and rock music of the students union and attend a poetry reading. The event featured a poet I had read and much admired and I was convinced that when my friends heard him they would become instant converts. We filed into a small hall in the town centre and I waited in awe as the great man took to the stage.

Unfortunately as soon as he opened his mouth all my expectations were dashed. He read his work as though he was reading the weather forecast. He took his excellent poems and murdered them. My friends gave me piercing looks, we escaped to the pub during the interval, and I never tried to persuade them to listen to poetry again.

Performing poetry well is a difficult art to master. Once you stand in front of an audience with your poem in your hand you are no longer a writer, you are an entertainer. You are asking people for some of their time and you have a responsibility to use it well. If I perform my poems badly I have done a disservice to my own work and to poetry in general. Performing your work in front of an audience is about living the words again, feeling once more the thoughts and emotions that made you write the poem in the first place. Unless you are prepared to do that, to take that risk, the poem will fall dead at your feet.

If poetry is to survive as a living art form it has to come out of hiding, to rub shoulders with people in the places where they work, live and drink. It has to be accessible, to speak to people and to talk about the kind of things that people worry about.

The Scottish Poetry Library has just appointed an Audience Development Officer. Thats good news, but I dont envy her the task. Although the support of official bodies is a vital element in the development of poetry, it is poets themselves who really hold the key to its survival. Poets have to invest energy and effort in making poetry something that people want to experience and enjoy. Unless poets are prepared to make that effort we may as well dig a hole next to Willy the hamster and bury it very, very deep.

John Burns is a poet and founder of the Mad Poets Society.

© John Burns, 2003