Jamaica’s first dub poets: Early Jamaican deejaying as a form of oral poetry

Dub poetry is usually taken to refer to a particular type of ‘performance poetry’, a brand of oral poetry performed to the accompaniment of reggae music. The term ‘dub poetry’ itself is thought to have been invented by the Jamaican poet Oku Onuora to describe a form of oral art that had been developing in Jamaica since the early 1970s. Oku Onuora defined the term in an interview conducted with the poet and critic Mervyn Morris in 1979.