Crafting a good poem for performance

In this next section, we are going to look at how you go about crafting a good poem for performance.

I use the word crafting rather than writing because some poets prefer to create their work orally. They may spend hours walking around, trying lines out aloud and memorising the good ones, rather than putting pen to paper. It's whatever works best for you - though I would say that if you do write your poems down, you should always speak the lines out loud. That's the only way you'll get a true sense of the rhythm and musicality of your work, by rolling the shapes and weights of the words off your tongue.

First things first - choose a good subject for your performance poem.

What's a good subject for a performance poem? Simply, something that grabs your audience's attention. There are no set rules, but in general, things that inspire strong emotions - like anger, love, fear, hate and friendship - provide the drama and common ground that captures an audience's imagination. Most of my inspiration comes from my own life experiences. That isn't to say that all my work is strictly autobiographical - I will fictionalise things that have happened to me or people I know, in order to intensify the drama and emotions.

What inspires you to write will probably also inspire other people to listen. For example, if you feel very strongly about the war, chances are your audience will too. They may or may not agree with your point of view, but they will find the subject interesting. If you have been dumped by a girlfriend or boyfriend, chances are, a significant proportion of the crowd will either have been dumped, have done the dumping, or experienced both sides of the coin. Therefore, you can explore and exploit this shared experience in your poem. But, most of all, believe in your own inspiration. If you feel truly passionate about a subject, your commitment to communicating what it is that you find so important can be absolutely compelling to an audience. For example, your audience might be completely ignorant about the life of the old lady who lives opposite you and who has no money to buy food for her cat, but if you care enough about her, then they will too. Or, on a lighter note, if you are madly devoted to bee-keeping, even if no-one in the crowd could care less about bees, your energy and passion for the hobby will captivate them - at least for the duration of your poem. (though it might be an idea to keep it relatively short - i. e. no major epics.)
 

Now you've chosen your subject, here's how you make it into a successful performance poem. I've given you a list of ingredients. Think about making your poem in the same way that you might bake a cake. Pick and choose which ingredients you want to use. For example, in your cake, you might use flour, butter, eggs and chocolate but leave out pineapple, ginger and almond. In your poem, you might use rhythm, internal rhyme, humour, emotion and popular culture.

Why not try sketching out some ideas for a performance poem? As you scroll through the list below, think about how you might use each element to explore your subject. Scribble down your thoughts on a piece of paper. We call this Brainstorming.

Brainstorming is a really useful thing to do when you first start to create a piece of imaginative work.

Brainstorming is putting all your ideas down on a piece of paper so you can look at them.

Brainstorming is about not thinking too hard and trusting that you already know the answers to many things.

Brainstorming is not worrying about spelling and handwriting.

Brainstorming is welcoming the blindingly obvious ideas as well as the weird and off-the-wall ones.

List of ingredients - aspects of performance poetry.

©  Francesca Beard