Hi travel pal!
It’s almost six p.m.,
and daytime is only a glowing line of bright yellow clinging to the black hills
of West Texas. We just
rolled through border patrol, where a very nice female officer inquired about
our citizenship. “USA,” we said,
and she snickered. Me with my Apple laptop plugged via converter into the car charger, and the GPS system
suction-cupped to the windshield telling us it’s “recalculating.” When she asked where we’re going and we
said Marfa we got yet another eye-roll, my crazy-looking dog turning around in
his doggie-booster seat and Josh flashing a charming smile behind his aviators
and hipster-fisherman’s cap. Small
artists’ community in the desert?
Umm, obviously.
In this case, we were
exactly what the officer expected.
But during the trip today, with nothing—and I mean nothing—but scrub
brush and the occasional metal pre-fab shed for a hundred miles at a time
(what’s in those things, anyway?), Josh and I started talking about a
particular unexpected phenomenon we
sometimes witness: the terribly good or wonderfully bad poetry reading.
It all started
because, between This American Life podcasts and naps, I sat in the passenger seat and read aloud
each of the poems from the “56 Days” section of Kate Greenstreet's latest book
“The Last 4 Things.” For those of
you who know Greenstreet’s absolutely wonderful poems, they’re an eerie,
disjunctive lot, full of recurring lines, reappearing characters and settings,
random bits of dialogue between unknown persons and scarce little linear
storytelling. Which, honestly,
isn’t such an easy read out loud (though she does quite the job herself, as
anyone who’s heard her knows). “The eye fills in what it knows,” she writes in
one poem, but so does the ear.
Surrealistic and leaping, the listener of these poems can never really
anticipate what might come next, so the speaker has to slow down, stay focused,
and, ultimately, use the voice to convey some of the emotional import and
changes in mood the text attempts.
I did my best.
I think this
difficulty rings true for much non-narrative poetry, but also for any poetry read
in public to an audience. And that’s where I declared a major problem I have
with graduate poetry-writing programs in general: the lack of focus on public
reading skills, as though those weren’t integral to our work as professional
poets. As a PhD student, I’m not
required (nor even encouraged) to take public speaking or drama courses. Nowhere in the curricula is it
acknowledged that, because we poets have a devastatingly small audience matched
by terrible underrepresentation in book stores, most of us will sell the
majority of our books (if we’re lucky enough to publish some) at poetry
readings. Shouldn’t that fact be
considered when deciding what professional poets should learn in school?
Josh agreed that
readings are important, but brought up an interesting point. Though we concurred on some fairly
obvious ways that poetry recitations can fail (we’ll get to those later), Josh
noted that a too-close focus on extremely stylized reading might suffer the
same potential dangers as over-workshopped poems: a slide into the
crowd-pleasing “middle ground” that might not actually work for every
poet. While on the page the
workshop mentality can lead to blandness, in a reading it would probably
promote the dramatic monologue style reading, which is great for some people
but wouldn’t work so well for, say, language poetry.
Still, when one
considers how spoken word and slam poetry often manage to entertain even when
the language, on the page, isn’t that exciting, it’s easy to see that good
performance (which a poet can achieve in myriad ways, despite Josh’s fear)
coupled with excellent writing is ideal.
From Albert Goldbarth, whose performative, yet funny and tender reading
at the Hammer Museum in LA last week just knocked me out, to my dear friend
Eric McHenry’s humble, snarky and utterly charming bit two years ago at the
Westchester Poetry Conference, to the sassy and sexy and stage-worthy recitations
of Jill Alexander Essbaum, to the gorgeous spectacle of (hearing-impaired poet)
Ilya Kaminsky’s roller-coaster intonations, I’ve seen remarkable poetry
readings at all volumes and with all sorts of attitudes.
However, I’ve yet to
hear a good reading where the poets:
1 – clearly didn’t
care. I’ve heard so many of my
colleagues say “I’m such a bad reader,” like it wasn’t a big deal; like it
couldn’t be changed with some work and practice. I’m a little offended by this, honestly. People come to the venue, they take
their seats and (hopefully) sit quietly and respectfully so that you might
share your art with them. Don’t we
owe people enough respect to try to do a good job, entertain them, or at least
convey our ideas well?
2 – mumbled, didn’t
enunciate or articulate words, spoke way to quickly or didn’t project at
all. This is obvious. Poetry can be difficult enough to
understand even when the listeners get the words. Help the kids out.
3 – over-explained the
poems. Personally, I sometimes
make jokes about situations or people in my poems before I say them. It’s my defense mechanism. But when a poet tells more than is
absolutely necessary about a poem, it robs the audience of what Josh called
“the pleasure of revelation.”
4 – had no stage
presence at all. This can mean a
few different things. Some poets
shrink into themselves. Some ramble. Some seem scared out of their minds.
5—speak in a poetry
voice. You know the one. The lilting up at the end of every
line. The pauses in strange
places. The absolute inability to
realize that poetry (though not prose) is written in sentences, usually, or at
least phrases, and might benefit from being vocalized as such.
6 – don’t understand
their audience. When Jim Shepherd,
an amazing fiction writer I just read for the first time this year, came to
USC, we had a really funny conversation about choosing the wrong piece for the
crowd. “Their eyes glaze over,” he
said, blanching at the memory.
Once fiction writers start a story, though, it’s hard for them to stop
or turn back. As poets, we have
the opportunity to cater our reading to the crowd, watch reactions, choose
poems more on the fly depending on how it’s going. All it takes is a little observation.
Anyway, this is
getting long, and I’m sleepy and full from a classically Texan dinner at the
Cattle Ranch Restaurant and Lounge (where the clientele were all truckers, the
chicken fried chicken was served with awesome white gravy, and the redneck-looking
guy was—as generally happens—unfailingly polite and super friendly to boot.) So I’ll just finish by saying, there
are endless ways to be winning, but the main one just seems to be caring about
the audience, and realizing that what we do is an art of communication, whether
on the page or in front of a microphone. And besides, I’ve always wanted to buy
more books after good poetry readings than bad ones. But certainly none of this matters if the work isn’t good in
the first place. So that’s
obviously the priority.
Now, dears, your
question:
What was the best reading you’ve ever been to,
and why?
Frost, who first wrote the line I stole for this blog entry title, and to Timothy
Steele, whose also stole it from Frost for his book title.)