I know this sounds like a project coordinator blowing his own trumpet, so take it with a pinch of salt if you like, but the third InZync Poetry Session in Kayamandi on Friday 3 June came off so resoundingly that we, the organisers, are a little concerned about the consequences of its success.

We’ll be having meetings this week. There is only one topic on the agenda: can we control this thing?  Should we even try?

Our problem: too many poets wanting to perform on Open Mic. Too many styles of performance. Too much of everything, and too much hungry energy. If you’d told us just three months ago, when we tentatively launched a monthly poetry session, that we would have this kind of a “problem” on our hands, we would scarcely have been able to believe it. But so it is.

At least one community group in Kayamandi has called for a meeting with us to discuss the politics of the Open Mic. Oh yes, and before I forget, the politics of the “invited” poets, too, in the first half of the programme.

The political questions are simple: Who goes first. Who chooses. Who does or does not get invited. For the Open Mic sessions: Who gets “excluded” as a result of time running out and people going home, eventually, out of sheer exhaustion. They’ve been cheering and shouting, emoting and handclapping. It’s strenuous stuff.

For the record: the third InZync Poetry Session featured rising rap-style poet Adrian Different (a young Stellenbosch University student with a roustabout determination to entertain, and boy, he certainly has the gift of the gab, with rhymes), Khanyi Mbongwa (another SU student with activist inclinations and a singing voice to die for), and the redoubtable magpie-writer Marlene van Niekerk (now a globally celebrated novelist, who had her work cut out for her, as a “paper” poet, in following the two free-microphone poets and their un-papered engagement with the audience).

Khanyi had the crowd on their feet, chanting for more. Adrian Different had them hopping with delight. Marlene employed strategies to satisfy the audience’s hunger for spoken poetry: She sought to bridge the gap between spontaneity and reflection by her use of sound and rhythm, her choice of both English and Afrikaans poetry, and her inventive mixing of styles. Anyone who can combine Scarlatti and dagga-smuggling in one poem has got hold of something, has found a slipway between aestheticism and la poésie engagée.

We had Riaan Oppelt as MC, who is an act on his own, reminding us poetically to mourn the death of Mama Sisulu, and Adrian Different taking charge of the Open Mic MC slot with belting energy.

So, what are the issues? For the poets, there is the question of whether one dares to take paper onto a stage such as this. What we are learning from the Kayamandi audience is that there is a hunger for “spontaneous”, unmediated performative expression. It was Wordsworth who said “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (although he added that it “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”) – whether or not the kind of poetic emotions flying around in Kayamandi take their origin from “tranquillity” or not will have to remain a moot point.

The real point is that poets must learn from the contexts in which they perform as much as they must “teach and delight” those audiences (Sir Philip Sydney, this time, in his famous “Defence of Poetry”). The choice, to some extent, boils down to publishing slim volumes for a handful of readers, if you’re lucky, on the one hand, or, on the other, performing “spontaneously” (or, probably more importantly, with the illusion of spontaneity) for hundreds of wonderfully alive, engaged, immediately present people such as the crowds at InZync in Kayamandi.

We’ll leave that question for further reflection, except to say that this is a choice that critically determines how and what one writes as a poet. Each poet must make up his or her own mind. It’s a decision that has material consequences of reception when you’re at the microphone, and you feel it “aan die bas”, where it can hurt if you’re not careful.

Another issue is about the confining category of “poetry” itself. The InZync sessions are bursting out of this folder, showing a hunger among performers to do other performative things apart from just reading poetry: they want to dance, they want to sing, do ensemble acts, and most exciting of all, stand-up comedy with lots of hilarious miming of politicians and other public figures. (Take note: satire works better than “whining”.)

The audience loves it. Maybe some would want to call such an audience “populist”. And there are perhaps others in the audience who want something cleaner and more refined: “proper” poetry, recollected in tranquillity.

Whatever the outcome of our meetings this week, we ignore at our peril what the Kayamandi audiences are telling us about the shaping of “knowledge” and performance in this moment.

Just one preliminary observation: what is palpable is a lively, irrepressible hunger for a rearticulation of the “real” in ways that also “feel” real. How does one “manage” this? Should one even try? Watch this space.

*Our next revised InZync Poetry Session will take place on the first Friday in August, so keep the 5th open.