'American performance poet Emily XYZ wrote In the opening (typed) notes of her (printed) songbook that she viewed the stage work contained within (pages) "as something to be heard than read, and as performance scripts rather than literature".
'We live in a world moving further from the limitations of binaries whilst still clutching to the need to define things in concrete. The duality of performed and written poetry has been forged by reaction as much as revolution. Many in power are unsettled by the continued rise of a poetics that can be understood without academic assistance. The loss of 'hard-won technique', of contested space. The growing degree of diversity. The discovery of access. Poems as entertainment, as popular culture. Poems as air. Spoken Word is both a new and an ancient aesthetic. A turning toward the fringe, the feral, the first, the unfinished, the unbound, the speaking tongue. Minority and First Nation voices interrogating a binary world to birth new-old lines:
InshaAllah means, there arc many worlds. Maybe in one, you are not dead
Don't make me choose / For I am both, l am more
(Introduction)
