If you can keep your head, while Dennis Hopper recites Rudyard
Kipling’s “If” on the Johnny Cash Show, then you are a better man than me, my
son. Check it out:
The poem (still wildly popular in England) and Hopper are both quite good. Personally, I have been unsuccessful thus far in recruiting celebrities to
recite my work on television. My fallback is to read the poems myself,
occasionally in public. There's an open mic near me that I like called
Carmine Street Metrics, though it takes place on Ave. B (after
getting bounced from the Bowery Poetry Club last year).
If I have a new poem, I like to try it out there. Reading a poem out in
front of an audience has become an important step in finishing it, or in seeing if it is, in fact, finished.
When, several years ago, I started teaching a class in
performing poetry (it’s basically an acting class for poets), what struck me most was
that performing a poem invariably led to revision. But testing the poem on the
voice—where, more and more, I’ve come to feel the poem really lives, i.e., in its spoken
music—the rough spots become more appaent. I can easily hear places where the rhythm falters, where
the clarity and precision of the expression are obscured.
Not surprisingly, people are often much better at reading other
people’s work than at reading their own. The difficulty of presenting one’s own
poems is two-pronged, I think. On the one hand, our
own poems are so personal, so close to home, so connected to our sense of
self-worth that it can be terrifying to present them to an audience.
(Even if one's poetry is not autobiographical, it is a charged
expression that can be ticklish to read in public.)
And, on the other hand, the poem may have gone cold for us, written, as it was, sometimes months or years earlier. It reminds me of the wonderful
passage in G. K. Chesterton’s book on Robert Browning: “There is an old
anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to
Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received
the following reply: 'When that poem was written, two people knew what it
meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.' ”
The fact is that, over time, we lose touch with the emotions
that gave rise to the poem; we become dull to the very intensities of sound and
meaning that we were at pains to include in the poem. In order to give the poem
its due in performance, we have to reawaken our emotional connection to the
words.
It’s just what we would do if we were called upon to read
out the work of another poet, so why not do it with out own work. I’ve gone on
too long here, so I won’t get into specific exercises at this point. For an unbeatable
example of how to break down the sense of a verse passage and find hidden in
each word both meaning and feeling, one cannot do better than this excerpt from
John Barton’s “Playing Shakespeare” (the book of the same name is an invaluable text for poets as
well as actors). Watch as, at about 2:10, Ian McKellen begins to go word by word through “Tomorrow
and Tomorrow”:
(Tomorrow and tomorrow, a look at Geroge Green's poem "Bangladesh" from his new book Lord Byron's Foot.)