"There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends"
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Mitchell is running a quiet jailbreak on the idea that poetry belongs to the page. By opening with “There have always been poets who performed,” he makes performance feel less like a modern gimmick and more like poetry’s original habitat: voiced, social, a little unruly. The kicker is the name he chooses. William Blake isn’t just any precedent; he’s the high-culture patron saint of visionary seriousness. If Blake could “sing” his work, Mitchell implies, then today’s spoken-word poet doesn’t need permission from the academy.
The phrasing does sly work. “Always” collapses centuries into a single lineage, flattening the hierarchy that usually ranks printed, “literary” poetry above performed poetry. Then the image: Blake at “parties of friends.” Not a lecture hall, not a pulpit, not a marketplace. A room. A circle. A living audience. Mitchell smuggles in the argument that poetry is made for human proximity, not institutional gatekeeping.
There’s also a tactical gentleness to it. He doesn’t shout down the bookish reader; he offers them Blake as a bridge, an invitation to widen what counts as legitimate poetic labor. In the late 20th-century British context, when “performance poetry” was often dismissed as populist or unschooled, Mitchell is doing cultural self-defense: reclaiming an older tradition to protect a newer practice.
Underneath it all is Mitchell’s democratic instinct. If poetry can be sung among friends, it can belong to anyone with a voice, not just anyone with a publisher.
The phrasing does sly work. “Always” collapses centuries into a single lineage, flattening the hierarchy that usually ranks printed, “literary” poetry above performed poetry. Then the image: Blake at “parties of friends.” Not a lecture hall, not a pulpit, not a marketplace. A room. A circle. A living audience. Mitchell smuggles in the argument that poetry is made for human proximity, not institutional gatekeeping.
There’s also a tactical gentleness to it. He doesn’t shout down the bookish reader; he offers them Blake as a bridge, an invitation to widen what counts as legitimate poetic labor. In the late 20th-century British context, when “performance poetry” was often dismissed as populist or unschooled, Mitchell is doing cultural self-defense: reclaiming an older tradition to protect a newer practice.
Underneath it all is Mitchell’s democratic instinct. If poetry can be sung among friends, it can belong to anyone with a voice, not just anyone with a publisher.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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