Performing the mentor

May, Will and Nissel, Joanna (2025) Performing the mentor. Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe: Advances in Poetry Performance Research, Literaturhaus Wien and University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. 13 - 14 Jun 2025.

Abstract

In Peter Howarth and Rowena Hawkins’ Festival as Form report (2024), an attendee at Greenbelt Festival noted the power of Roger Robinson paying tribute to his mentors during his reading: ‘[Robinson] didn’t hide away from the fact that [being a poet’s] just hard work […] you need help from other people […] it’s not this kind of glorified solo thing that only a few people get to do because they’re the talented ones.’ The practice and identity of the poet shaped in this festival-goer’s account replaces genius with diligence, prowess with humility, and solitary endeavour with a culture of support. In doing so, it seems to democratise their understanding of poetry itself.

Yet what else might be at stake in making the ‘hard work’ of being a poet part of what is performed in a reading? How far do the mentors conjured into being by Robinson transform a spoken word performance into a textual work of drafts, revisions, and edits? Shaping our argument around three case studies —performances and readings by poets supported through The Complete Works, participants in the SLAMbassadors programme, and poets who took part the Jerwood-Compton Poetry Fellowships— this joint paper considers how live poetry performs the mentor, and how the increasingly visible role of this absent-presence on stage shapes our understanding of the poet, and the collective practice of poetry performance itself.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Joanna Nissel

Download statistics