Performance Poetry and the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The paper attempts to analyse the growing relevance of performance poetry in these times. Performance poetry amalgamates the requirement of poetry and prose while retaining it's own uniqueness. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a major revival of the oral poetic form which can be traced back to the birth of literature itself. Sabrina Benaim, Alex Dang, Sarah Kay(Founder of the Voice) and Lee Makobe(Founder of Vocal Revolutionaries) are a few of many contemporary performance poets who deal with latter-day concerns such as cultural deterioration, gender, identity, euthanasia, impossible physical standards, post-coloniality, racial issues and homosexuality, just to name a few. The tendency of performance poetry, as a a counter-cultural movement, to review society more objectively than other mainstream arts is appraised in this paper as well.