Page Vs. Stage Poetry

I tend to take the middle-ground in the argument between "stage" and "page" poetry. No need for name calling. There is worth in both mediums folks; can't we all just get along?

From The Stranger:

Contemporary poetry's shit-talking tension—when it isn't raging between the New Yorker's Harvard grads and the Poetry Foundation's Stegner Fellows—boils over most quickly, and most enjoyably, when "stage" poets find themselves in the same room with "page" poets.

Willfully déclassé "stage" performers like Martin Espada and Anne Waldman bite their thumbs at the stage-shy "page" types like Lyn Hejinian and Harryette Mullen—and the followers of each camp greet their rivals with equal parts bafflement and antagonism: Harold Bloom, in the Paris Review, calls slam poetry "the death of art." The Green Mill Slam Team in Chicago responds, "The pen is mightier than the sword, when I jab it in your neck!"

Read more here.