A performer and a poet

Vivek Narayanan begins his poetry reading sitting among the audience at the back of the hall and continues his recital as he gets up and moves to the front. "It helps me build my performance," he explains.

"Performance" is the right word "" Narayanan doesn't just recite his poems, he acts them out, complete with strong vocal inflexions, chanting and hand gestures.

There's some interesting work in there, including an "ode to prose and prose-writers" ("you take our money/but we love you anyway") and a tribute to Silk Smitha, the southern sex symbol who killed herself a few years ago. But what is more interesting is the way Narayanan performed them.

He's been writing poems seriously since he was 13 (he's 34 now) but he first became interested in performance poetry in a club in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. "However, some of the work there started to veer towards slapstick," he says, "and I became uncertain about practicing it." Then he began listening to rap music.

"The rap underground is fascinating. Ten-year-olds living in black districts in the US have a better understanding of rhythm and meter than many self-anointed poets do. It's no surprise that poets like Derek Walcott have such high regard for rap music."

Around that time Narayanan also discovered some old recordings of readings by poets. "Did you know Eliot was the first to record on LP and that there are still extant recordings of Yeats, Tennyson and Browning performing their work? Edison made those early recordings "" maybe he thought he could make money off them!"

Many of those early recordings, Narayanan says, were very inventive, with the poets paying careful attention to tempo and meter. But subsequently, the idea that poetry reading should be "natural" took over.

"As a result, people have become disconnected from one of the essential things about poetry "" that its meaning lies in the performance as much as in the words. These days it's become habitual to simply analyse the words for meaning, thereby turning poetry appreciation into an academic exercise. But each line needs to be tested for sound. This is one thing that differentiates poetry from prose."

How then do you differentiate poetry from songwriting, I ask, since one of the things we are repeatedly told is that the great modern songwriters "" Dylan, Simon "" mustn't be called "poets"; that the music, vocals and words have to be given equal importance in appreciating their work.

"There's a fine line," Narayanan admits, "but you have to think of it as a continuum. The same way the writing of a business letter is an exaggerated, formalised branch of prose, songwriting is a branch of poetry." His own influences include songwriters and poets: from underground rappers like Talib Kweli and Mos Def to singer-songwriters Bob Marley and Leonard Cohen.