David Orr’s article on performance poetry in the NYT this week stirred me to revisit the issue. I have been to over 150 poetry readings, only 3 of which were advertised and executed as “performance,” none of which I enjoyed. In the others (not all of which I enjoyed, either), poets were at least striving – as far as I could tell – to render or deliver language constructed primarily to be read from the page by a solitary reader, though perhaps aloud, to allow the whole body to be involved in a different fashion from listening. Sometimes, the poets I’ve heard have been more than a little theatrical (Dickey, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds), elfin (Muldoon), aw-shucks (you name ’em; some are my literary neighbors), but the best of them still seemed in the spell of the text more than in the spell of the occasion, the audience, intoning in the glamour of the spotlight.
“Intoning,” “chanting.” The Anglo-Saxon folk had a word for it, mathalode, except that they didn’t use all the same letters we do. The scop Widsith was said to render his lines to audiences in this fashion, to open up his word hoard. I like to imagine a recital like that of Demodokos in The Odyssey and maybe Homer himself, just like a good hearthside yarner (but with a harp). This doesn’t mean that the reciters are not personable, but that they moderate between audience and text, instead of grandstanding.
In the mead hall, around the campfire, in the campus common room or lecture hall – I’m sure there’s an ambiguous zone, a wide and uncertain threshold between delivering the language in an intimate way which is the public counterpart to spellcasting the written word, and performance with a different emphasis, using face, body, and all the interactive options to privilege the moment of broadcast rather than the many moments of composition. Orr cites Charles Bernstein’s insight that a poem has a plural life, which makes sense to me. I would call the two aspects of the poem’s life the communal and the meditative, and I truly enjoy and am more stimulated and provoked by the latter, though I’ve sometimes heard master readers like Dove, Komunyakaa, Carolyn Kizer and Heaney who made the listening experience at once immediate and reflective. How did they do that? A resonant voice helps, command of the text, but the poets who engage me most at a reading know how to create the illusion for me that they are reading not to a group but to one listener, an auditor who prefers nuance to flourish, suggestion to expostulation.
[A note: Over breakfast my wife and I agreed that, though we prefer the intimate rendition, we’d rather hear a theatrical poet than be bored, yet we’d rather be bored than condescended to, harangued or invited to endorse a sow’s ear paraded about like a silk purse or even a pork chop. Many evenings, the actual pork chop is perhaps the best option of all.]
[Another note: I’m aware that bards, scops, rhapsodes and the like probably had leeway to extemporize. They worked within a normative rhythm like a strong baseline, and employed established epithets, catalogues, digressions and set pieces, but they did like, performance-oriented poets, have license to extemporize. I wonder if it led them to soggy sentimentality, bantam struts, weeping fits and transgressive rants? I’d love to know.]
[Last note: Worst reading I ever attended? The poet bragged about his/her awards and famous friends, told jokes, rambled, preened, explained how s/he would teach a course the school offered and asked to be asked back. Best? Hard to say, but two of the best four or five times the reader was Merwin.]
Plenty of poets can be viewed on Youtube, but anyone who likes to HEAR poets read without actually seeing them should visit the fine audio archive at Harvard’s Woodbury Room: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/. (Thanks to Philip Belcher for the reminder.)
