Poem Analysis: Outspoken Live

A poet relates to the world by constructing their identity through their performance in public spaces. At Outspoken Live, poet Lisa Luxx performed ‘He Sounds Just Like Me’, a moving poem about her being adopted by a British family and her longing for the “absent root” in which she came from Syria. The audiences’ mood changes when Luxx says “[Syria]…is followed by silence”. This eerily captures the atmosphere in the venue. The silent audience shows their awareness of the conflict in Syria, brought to them on a stage in Oxford Circus through Luxx’s performance. Elsewhere, at the poetry café, a disabled poet, Sarah Jackson used a text-to-speech programme to read her untitled poem. There was beauty in which the device added another layer to the poet’s performance. From this, my understanding is that the writer relates to the world through performance not the performance of their words.
The interviewee means this in the context of teaching. Although, in performing poetry, for the “work to go into the world”, I believe the poet has to construct an identity through the said performance. At Homegrown poetry, Kareem Parkins-Brown references his hometown (North-West London) in his poem ‘Responding to the Artist Impression’. In this, he responds to the government’s failure to gentrify the area. Therefore, Parkins-Brown shows he relates to the world through performance, which influenced my understanding of how important performance this is in the spoken word