91Èȱ¬

Not for the first time, this month has found me thinking that the greatest strength of spoken word/performance poetry/live literature - call it what you will - is also its greatest weakness.

No, I'm not getting all Sun Tzu on you. I mean that the strength and weakness of spoken word is that it's open to anyone, requiring nothing but a microphone (if that). And as much as the inherent democracy can be exciting, the lack of quality control can be a flaw.

But I've begun to wonder whether the success of the spoken word scene is damaging to emerging poets. Put simply, are all new poets now funnelled into spoken word because, thanks to the sterling work of the likes of Apples and Snakes, that's where the opportunities are, even if their work is actually better suited to the page?

I mused upon this the other day when chatting to Jay Bernard. Jay is one of the best young poets around. In fact, she's more than that, a writer of extraordinary panache and emotional intuition and a capable performer. But performance is not what she wants to do. And why should she?

It made me realise how lucky we are still to have some excellent independent poetry publishers like Bloodaxe, Carcanet and relative newcomers Tall Lighthouse. It's Tall Lighthouse that published Jay's debut collection Your Sign Is Cuckoo Girl. Jay and I discussed her plans to get a more extensive collection together. She seemed worried that she wasn't quite ready, so I wheeled out my football manager aphorisms - "if you're good enough, you're old enough." That kind of thing.

I remembered this exchange later in the day when reading Shelley's Queen Mab. It's probably the most eloquent expression of indignation I know: 'The grave and hoary-headed hypocrites/ Without a hope, a passion, or a love/ Who, through a life of luxury and lies/ Have crept by flattery to the seats of power/ Support the system whence their honours flow.'

Stirring stuff and published in 1813, when Shelley was just 21. It seems my football clichés contain an ounce of truth and, whether your chosen medium is the page or the stage, the time is always now.

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