The Tour

A chronicle of the early days of performance poetry, presented as a road trip in verse by one of its greatest practitioners.

π.O.’s new collection of poems tells a story about what is dubbed ‘The Dirty T-Shirt Tour’, in which a group of Australian poets travel to cities in the United States and Canada to give readings. It is composed as a diary, written from the point of view of one of the poets, who finds themselves at odds with the others by virtue of their class and migrant background, and their commitment to a poetry, usually lampooned as ‘performance’ poetry. It is his first visit to America, which he views with both wonder and alarm. Isolated in the group by his commitment to a poetics of ‘utterance’, he finds friendship and acclamation in the audiences and the people he encounters on the street. The tensions portrayed extend beyond the group to encompass issues of racism, sexism and class, as the book offers snapshots of American society, viewed by an outsider, which are in themselves an expression of his poetics. The Tour stands as a chronicle of the difficulties and triumphs of performance poetry, of which π.O. was one of the pioneers, long before it became the popular form it is today.

[π.O.’s] invigorating use of punctuation and phonetic spelling reminds us that language is always vocal, accented and political…Increasingly disarming and affecting…The Tour is a kind of ars poetica, an implied manifesto of engagement and dissent.
Andy Jackson, The Saturday Paper