JA04B: Australian Poets and Their Works: A Reader's Guide, 1995, William Wilde

Oxford University Press; South Melbourne

p 140 - 141

KOMNINOS (Komninos Constantine Zervos) (1950 - ) born Richmond, Melbourne, of Greek parents, has an honours degree in science but since 1985 has devoted much of his life and energy to furthering performance poetry in Australia. His published works include The Komninos Manifesto (1985), The Second Komninos Manifesto (1986), The Last Komninos Manifesto (1987), Wordsports (1989), High Street Kew East (1990), Komninos: The Poet and His Poetry (1991), On the Way to the fridge for a Snack ([991), The Baby Rap (1991), The Venus of Marrickville (1993) and Komninos by the Kupful (1994). His performances have taken place in schools, libraries, prisons, factories, pubs, clubs, on street corners and in writers' trains.

Komninos's poems tell of life as it is lived in everyday places - the work place, the pub, suburban homes, city streets - and reflect the situations people face in the family, with friends, enemies and fellows. The poems are usually humorous or sad, often satirical and dramatic, mostly boisterous and lively. His instructions to a rock and roll audience on how to appreciate poetry reveal the attitude of the performance poet to audience participation.

If you feel like sleeping, sleep

or chatting at the back of the crowd

if you feel like snoring, snore

but please don't snore too loud

- if you feel like laughing, laugh

if you feel like shouting, shout

if you feel like clapping, clap

that's what poetry's all about.

Reactions to such performance have been mixed. Komninos's own comments indicate the difficulties facing the performance poet: 'most think you're a poof- they all think you're a bludger.' To offset audience scepticism the performance poet has to work harder than his more traditional counterpart, the published poet:

you have to make your words electric

to sizzle with energy and still be euphoric

10 dabble and dribble in dialectic metaphoric

without too much boring didactic rhetoric

to spell out the truth and still have aesthetic

to bend words and change words 'til they're brightly neonic

to capture the sounds at speeds supersonic

The performance poet's goal, finally, is

to free the words from their traditional prisons

of books and libraries and academic institutions,

to undress them, expose them to the whole population ...

to take the words off the page, give them wings,

and let them fly to new destinations.

Komninos's most effective poems include 'childhood in richmond' which gives glimpses ot the sadness of a young boy growing up in a household where economic and social pressures were intense; 'bustalk', which catches the speech cadences and rhythms of women gossiping on a bus; 'it's great to be mates with a koori', which is riotously rollicking and full of easy rhythm; 'i hate cars', which effectively displays the verbal power or performance poetry.

The traditional poet's attitude to performance poetry like Komninos's is ambivalent. Geoff Page, for example, sees value in the attempts of performance poets to win back some of poetry's earlier entertainment function which has been largely surrendered to television, but he warns that in the process they risk underestimating the true depth of their art as poets. The rapid growth of performance poetry has led, however, to increased sales of books of poetry and to greater public awareness of poetry as entertainment. In 1993 Komninos won the $20 000 Ros Bower Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in Community Arts.