What I liked most about this new event, which had a real buzz about it, was the determination to break down the barriers between different kinds of poetic practice. Instead of cordoning off the performance poetry in a festival slam, for instance, the organizers had clearly made a conscious decision to programme spoken word, avant garde, multimedia and more traditional work back to back. And it worked. I got to hear poets working in other forms who I would never have encountered otherwise, but more importantly the diversity in the room was visible and vocal, in terms of age, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and disability. This is something few poetry festivals are achieving at the moment, in my experience. While Verve clearly benefits from its location and the diversity of its potential audiences close at hand in such a large city, the programmers have to be congratulated for their innovative approach.
My enjoyment of the day also brought home to me a wider truth about this kind of diversity. In these days when politics has seemingly been reduced to a frantic defending of one's territory against the perceived threat of others (even to the extent of obsessing about who gets to use which public bathroom, if recent debates in the US are anything to go by), it can sound like a lazy liberal slogan to insist that it enriches us to hear the voices of people whose experience differs from our own. The poetry world, like any other sphere, sometimes suffers from the impulse to draw boundaries and police them, but more diversity always means more for everyone. Nobody has to lose out.
In this spirit, everyone should be encouraged to support another project currently seeking funding: the anthology Stairs and Whispers, the first major UK anthology of poetry and essays by disabled and D/deaf poets. As I write, they have hit 67% of their target, and for donations from £15 you'll get a copy of the book posted to you when it comes out. You know what to do!
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