Stuffy old fuddy-duddy that I am, I long clung to the notion that poetry, like Victoria Beckham, is best seen and not heard. Our English teacher at school — a thwarted thespian, as so many are — used to declaim Wilfred Owen in a high-pitched quiver, designed to reduce us to tears. It certainly did. For years afterwards, like Hermann Goering, I felt like reaching for a revolver every time someone started to recite verse.

Then I experienced an epiphany, as they say in poetic circles. I attended a poetry show — recital is too drab a word — given by Philip Wells, the self-styled “fire poet”. I was mesmerised. Declaiming from memory, he never fluffed a line, and performed with the panache of a Bronx hiphopper and the polish of a Gielgud.

After that, I was hooked on performance poets, or “slam poets”, or “stand-up poets” or “spoken word artists”, or whatever they call themselves now. (It’s a great testament to their individuality, of course, that they can’t even agree on their genre.) I started to search them out — the masterly Rastafarian, Benjamin Zephaniah; the whimsical Murray Lachlan Young (whose Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine is surely the poetic epitaph of 21st-century Britain); the brilliant Jeneece Bernard, bard of Croydon (and, at 17, just anointed as Foyles Young Poet of the Year); the acerbic, cross-dressing Chloe Poems. It was Chloe, in fact, who recited (on Radio 3’s Slam Poet contest) probably the sauciest eulogy penned about Diana, Princess of Wales — including the moving couplet: “We struggle on now our hope is gone/ Thank God we’ve still got Elton John”.

At the Purcell Room on London’s South Bank next Thursday there’s a chance to hear the best young performance poets do their stuff. Five finalists will slug it out, metaphor by metaphor, in a contest called The Contenders, organised by the live-poetry organisation Apples & Snakes. It’s serious stuff: at stake is a £10,000 Arts Foundation fellowship. But it’s also likely to be a night of bracing humour and high emotion. Some of these poets, unlike my English teacher, can reduce you to tears for the right reasons.

Popularising poetry is a tricky business — not least because there are many respected poets who regard events like The Contenders as Raymond Blanc would regard your local burger bar. And there have been false dawns before. But right now, with the resurgence of cabaret coinciding with the street energy of rap, the climate seems more conducive to a spoken-poetry boom than for decades.

In the end, it’s a class thing. Shakespeare — no mean slam poet — spoke to the groundlings as much as to the nobs. But for centuries after that, poetry in Britain became an all-too-elite preoccupation. As Adrian Mitchell once wrote: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” But in their choice of salty subjects and, sometimes, even saltier language, today’s young poets seem at least to be reaching beyond the middle classes.

The Contenders, Purcell Room, South Bank, London SE1 (www.rfh.org.uk 0870 4018181), Thur, 7.45pm