Benjamin Zephaniah

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I have been called a dub poet, an oral poet, a performance poet, a pop poet, a pub poet, a rap poet, a Rasta poet, a reggae poet and even a black poet, the list goes on. In all honesty, none of those titles offend me, I am probably all of these persons but if I had to chose one I would start with oral poet. I say this because as I write my poetry, I can hear the sound of it, sometimes I can be heard giving birth to my poems by those close to me and sometimes those that are close to me get tired of hearing me give birth too often.

The oral tradition is timeless, it is simply the tradition of passing on information orally and much of this information is handed down in the form of poems, songs and stories. People in the western world tend to see the oral tradition as something from the past and not relevant in the age of the Internet, but elsewhere the tradition carries on regardless. The oral tradition thrives when there are restrictions on peoples abilities to speak or when they have no access to the media.
Dub Poetry

If you can see poetry as a tree with many branches and oral poetry as one of those branches, then a leaf on that branch could be Dub Poetry. Dub poetry has its roots in Jamaica and is closely linked to Reggae music. Sometimes we dub poets perform solo, at other times we may be accompanied by a couple of drummers and at other times we may have a 9 piece band with us, but even in solo performances you should be able to hear its music.

Dub poetry is political, no one made this rule, that's just the way it is and poets like myself, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean Breeze, Oku Onuora and Lillian Allen all worked in community groups which gave us our first audiences. At the time this was a great thing, there was a poem with every manifesto or constitution and a poet on every demonstration but then the poetry began to appeal to a much larger audience and we went out into the world to preach to the unconverted.
The oral poets relationship with the audience is most important, she or he has to read the audience and be able to fully communicate and deliver the message. We oral poets do get published now but knowing that reading is a minority pastime, it would be fair to say that the publishing of books is way down on our list of priorities. We put poetry into music, into plays. On television, radio, we perform like crazy people, we put poems on post cards and in micro chips, in fact we do anything to change the dead, white and boring image of poetry. I would never play one off against the other, poetry that is written strictly for the page does not automatically rank higher than performance poetry or vice versa. Every branch on the tree is important but it must be said that oral poetry has a much longer history and has closer links with the masses than much of the poetry that is published by the multinationals and what has always excited me is the fact that there is no expert editor telling you what they think will work, you know how it works immediately, the public tell you. The feedback is automatic and it really is a great feeling to hear hundreds of people chant along with your poem when that poem has never been written down.