So last night I went to a reading in San Francisco. But this was not a science fiction reading. It was a promotion for Word Warriors, an anthology of work by women performance poets. This is not an art form I have followed very closely (though I do have a lingering fondness for John Cooper Clarke), and I guess that many of you will be unfamiliar with it too, but if you can just imagine an entire anthology full of people who have the same boundless energy and room-sized personality as Ellen Klages then you won’t go too far wrong.

As you might guess, being an all-women anthology, the book has a strong feminist leaning. But this is not the austere, intellectual feminism of my youth that was anti just about anything that could possibly be accused of being ideologically unsound, nor is it the “I am a Princess and it is not fair that I can’t have everything I want” feminism that we see so much of in the blogosphere these days. This is the in-your-face feminism of Michelle Tea and Sister Spit. It is angry, it is aggressive, it takes on real opponents, and it is defiantly inclusive. Many (perhaps most) of the writers are lesbians, many of them are persons of color, and thus far I have counted one trans woman, two trans men, and an intersex person. All very San Francisco.

You may well ask what the point is of producing a book of performance poetry, and you would be right to do so. This is especially true of the more free-form texts that make up the bulk of the material. If you can’t gauge the rhythm of a piece from looking at it on the page them it loses much of its power. Editor Alix Olson seems aware of this, because each contributor, in addition to supplying two poems, has been asked to provide a short essay about themselves and their work. These are often fascinating reading, and do a lot to put the poems in context, as well as giving a newbie like me plenty of background on the performance poetry scene.

An event like this is very different from an SF reading. Far too many SF writers, wonderful crafters of words though they may be, don’t have much idea of how to perform their work. Performance poets, on the other hand, live and die by their performances. Of course short stories and novels are not written for performance in the way that poems can be, and a good performance can often mask poor word-smithing, but I suspect the two communities could usefully learn from each other.

Having said that, there are obvious similarities too. Any artist, no matter what field they work is, is going to be plagued by pigeonholing, and beset by fans who just want more of what they were doing 10 years ago. Equally any reading is going to have someone in the audience who asks some variant of “where do you get your ideas from?” I tried not to cringe too obviously.

Overall it was a great evening. Inspiring too. Definitely enough to get me buying the book and spending the BART ride home reading about the many contributors who were not at the reading. I’d also recommend that if you get a chance to see Alix Olson or Meliza Banales then you should do so. What’s more, it appears from their web sites that both of them will be appearing at Books Inc. on Van Ness on Friday, hopefully with other contributors to the book. Recommended (though I won’t be there myself as I have to collect Kevin from SFO).