Kenneth Slessor in the 1940s, and Bruce Dawe and Thomas Shapcott, in the 1950s, introduced the sound of everyday Australian voices, incorporating the vernacular and the colloquial language of Australia as part of their poetry.
Their voices as heard on the Audio anthology "Australian Poetry : Live (Page, 1995)" are devoid of the BBC British radio announcers accent often used by Australian poets like R. D. Fitzgerald, A. D. Hope and James McAuley when reading verse (even Dylan Thomas discarded his Welsh accent for the BBC British radio voice.)
(Thorne, 2003)International poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ted Hughes, Adrian Mitchell from the UK, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the US, came to Adelaide Arts Festival Writers' Week in the late 1960s and early 1970s and gave great, as reported in the newspapers, public performances to town hall's full of people.
Geoffrey Dutton wrote in the Bulletin: "Maybe Yevtushenko is the man who will give the relation between poet and public in Australia the tremendous lift it badly needs and so easily might achieve".
Bruce Dawe believed that Yevtushenko's visit would "help to establish in people's minds that poetry is not necessarily and forbiddingly long-hair or academic".
By the 1970s there was a great push in Australia for the voices to be heard that were other to the Anglo-centric male dominated majority, i.e. women, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, indigenous Australians, differently abled and gendered persons.
Many of these were held in bookshops or bars – unelaborate, even casual occasions whose value was to be found as much in the opportunity they gave people to get together with a purpose as in the poetry that was read.
This was a milestone publication in Australian poetic culture, the first commercially available sound recording of twelve of Australia's most prominent poets of the time.
As early as 1973 Eric Beach had started to work as a full-time, grossly under-paid poet, conducting workshops at schools and performing and was a recipient of a grant from the newly formed Australia Council for the Arts.
Ania Walwicz, Vicki Viidikas, thalia, Sylvia Kantazaris, Anna Couani, and Pi O emerged as strong non-Anglo voices in performance poetry, and Kate Jennings's anthology of women writers Mother i'm rooted, 1975, highlighted the lack of women in Australian poetry anthologies.
Chris Mansell and Les Wicks, among others, were prime movers in this new movement, organising readings and publishing Compass and Meuse (with Bill Farrow) respectively.
Dorothy Porter and Robert Adamson, Sydney poets, refused to attend the 1976 Writers' Week of Adelaide Festival because they were not going to be paid for their invited readings.
The coinage of the term that matches with the commonly accepted definition of performance poetry is credited, however, to American poet Hedwig Gorski, who used it in fliers and posters in the mid-1970s.
There were many other semi-professionals, like Ken Smeaton, Geoffrey Eggleston and Shelton Lea in Victoria, but the majority held full-time jobs and did their performing as a secondary activity.
The 1980s saw a greater development in performed poetry, with more professional poets earning their living by poetry, Geoff Goodfellow joined Jenny Boult in South Australia, komninos, Myron Lysenko, Liz Hall, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Lauren Williams, Kerry Scuffins, Kerry Loughrey, Carmel Bird, in Melbourne, Grant Caldwell, Chris Mansell, Les Wicks and Steven Herrick in Sydney and others in other states.
Literary readings were usually restricted to academics, publishers, writers and readers and Writers' Week programs, although in Sydney there were readings in Balmain, notably in the Cafe L'Absurd where poets such as Nigel Roberts, Chris Mansell, Cornelis Vleeskens and Rae Desmond Jones often performed and were joined by interstate and international readers on occasions.
In Brisbane, Talk it down, at the Storey Bridge Hotel at Kangaroo Point had weekly readings that drew large mixed crowds of poetry lovers and public bar drinkers alike.
[3]A notable manifestation of Australian performance poetry occurred in Sydney in early 1991, when ten poets, including Pi O, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Amanda Stewart, Jas H. Duke, and others, teamed up with jazz musician Jenny Sheard, to create, direct and produce the first ever, poet-performed/directed and produced, dramatic verse play ever presented.
Les Murray wrote in Quadrant in April 1977, that he would never be asked to read in the Town Hall during Writers' Week, "when the overseas heavies come around, we are shown our true place in the estimation of our cultural establishments.
It had by the publication of Bernstien's book in 1998, been extended in popular usage to include other types of spoken word texts featured in the anthology.
In 2001 Anne McBurnie provided an anthology, Prize Winning Australian Performance Poetry, which was aimed at primary school students.
[5] In the US, Def Poetry and Slams are the legacy of performing poets like Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and those like Hedwig Gorski who eschewed writing for print and publishing their poems in books in favor of recording and radio broadcast.
The Red Room Company has made this combination the basis of their public poetry projects, commissioning and presenting staged performances of work, often within spatial installations.
Jas H. Duke and Ania Walwicz, in Melbourne and Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann in Sydney, were influential, great performers and unique in style and content.
But an international festival of Sound Poetry, SOUNDWORKS curated by Nicholas Zurbrugg and Nick Tsoutas at Performance Space as part of the Sydney Biennale in 1986 highlighted the intensity of the activity in Australia over the previous 15 years.
(Zurbrugg and Tsoutas, 1986) One way or another, all of the artists performing at the SOUNDWORKS festival splice cut, heighten, release and more or less transform the creative potential of words, sounds and gestures, be these live, recorded, filmed, projected, or various combinations of all these possibilities.