In a change of pace, entertainer Paul McDermott, of Doug Anthony All Stars and Good News Week fame, is bringing his show Poems to Smith’s Alternative.

Billed as “a whirlwind of words, images and confessions,” it’s aimed at making audiences laugh uneasily.

Alone on stage with no guitar, he’ll perform recent works of rhyme, talk about his early life in Canberra, where he was schooled at Marist and Dickson Colleges and unveil the kinds of scribbles, drawings and paintings that got him into the old Canberra School of Art, at which he studied for four years.

Unsurprisingly, McDermott has already pronounced that poetry is dead – in free verse of course, as follows:

Amongst all the multitudinous variants of performance the most maligned is the vocal presentation of a poem (or poems).

And justifiably so.

The reading of poetry (aloud) to an individual (generally) or groups of people (rarely) is seen by many (in the profession of the Arts) as the most self-serving, shallow, egotistically vapid, puerile and purposeless of pursuits.

Poetry is dead. It has been dead for years. It cannot be resuscitated.

And it should not be performed live as an entertainment as – it is not entertaining.

It is the sad pony in the empty field.

Whether McDermott is right or not will be seen in his Poems shows at Smith’s Alternative, March 28-30.