Performance poetry is not for everyone…. Poetry is a broad church, the natural partner of humour as well as intensity, love and grief as much as short girls and text messages. As Don Paterson, two-times winner of the TS Eliot prize, puts it: “Poetry is a basic function of language, not an operation we perform on it. It’s the way language renews itself, whenever it’s both emotionally charged and short of time. As long as we speak, there will be poetry.

Iain Hollingshead, Standing up for pure poetry (via)