Thinking About Poetry
Readings & Collaboration In Time Of Cultural Crisis
(for Kiyomi Tanouye, R.I.P)
I haven’t got asked in a long time, but I turned down a
poetry reading today. I used to do them all the time. Excuses, excuses. I’m not
ready. It’s been over a decade since the last book, “aside from my job, I’ve
become a hermit,” etc…..but does the feeling of being crippled, not fully
comfortable in body, an awareness of metal where there should be leg, have
something to do with it?
One aspect of the PTSD I’ve struggled with since that near
fatal accident in 2004 I probably need to come to terms with is a phenomenon
you could call “stage fright.” I stopped doing poetry readings when people
asked until they stopped asking, but I don’t know if fear is really at the essence of it.
As I lie bedridden, I thought back to the days when I had
two good legs, and those long NYC trudges through the brown ice and snow, with
a group often as big as 20 (mostly) poets, looking for a bar or restaurant with
circular tables for a more democratic post-reading talk than was possible at
the places with long thin “last supper style” tables which encourage
hierarchical pecking orders. And, during these walks, the conversational
pairing off that happened was almost as fun and enlightening as when we finally
got to sit in the bar (and occasionally switch seats so we could be social
fireflies), but that seemed no longer possible now that such walks were
impossible, and, besides the Bay Area is not the walking city NYC was (except
perhaps during Litquake or Beastcrawl).
It was often on these
walks or restaurants afterwards that I felt that poetry came socially closest
to being a collaborative art form (even if, or maybe even because, the
conversations were not themselves commodified). In NYC, many mastered the art
of talking over someone in order to listen better!
Indeed, the riot of enthusiasms issuing from many inwardly
directed writers could be intoxicating, and even detoxifying, like these
conversations (even if at times contentious), allowed us to unleash much of
that energy pent-up from the protracted solitude our art required. These
conversations were also fertile ground for our writing to perhaps unpack or
sort or, on the other hand, let exist as fragments (or, in my case, somewhere
between; I should probably mention that this was before Facebook did a number
on the fragment). This mysterious, and/or even glorious, symbiosis, or see-saw,
that could occur between the solitary and the social was on full display here. It
was perhaps the closest that poets and novelists could get to that feeling when
a bunch of musicians decide that they’re sick of their solo acts, and will
gladly settle for only having 2 or 3 songs on an album to be part of a “super
group” that can create a sound larger, or deeper, than the sum of its parts.
The “poetry reading” that occasioned this wasn’t really the
performance, but rather the pre-text, or as one friend put it, “the poetry
reading’s like the emperor’s new clothes,” and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes you need a “thing” (or pre-text) or nothing’s gonna happen.
It’s easy to forget how relatively new the whole standard of
the poetry reading is. It wasn’t so big in Williams’ and Stevens’ day. Even
O’Hara did relatively few. The so-called “founders” of the American Canon,
Dickinson and Whitman demurred, and, as Anselm Berrigan put it back in the 90s,
“Catallus never had to go down on a mic.” It rose, perhaps, as a democratizing
tendency in the 50s and 60s. I think I embraced it because it could save the
page from itself (just as the page could save the stage from itself): When I
first started giving readings, I learned it’s always important to read some
work you don’t consider finished so you can hear what you sound like trying to
say it to a room full of people. You can tell if you come off pretentious, but
then some are charmed by what others consider pretentious, and that is probably
unavoidable, but a lot of this is happening on an unspoken level, and it
doesn’t matter if you’re just projecting because it helps you revise. Perhaps
that’s the highest function of the reading?
Yes, I too have enjoyed the speedy wash of words over me, as
I stood at the back of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, with Meg Arthurs, swaying and
crossing the line, a little too much for some, into dancing, and, yes, feeling
the beautiful disorientation and the implied task of later, in solitude,
reading the book, if there was a book.
I have loved the readers who aspire more to “stand-up
comedy” as well as those who aspire more to prayer (though preferring the more
collective Afrocentric notions of praise to the Euro-American dominant forms).
And I’m enough of a narcissist to have loved the sound of my electrically
amplified voice when I lean into the microphone and recite soft and deep, and
then step away from it and get louder and flail. Ah, but what’s a poetry reading without the post-reading soiree? Is it
as barren as a computer without an internet?
At the typical poetry reading, the room was mostly filled
with other poets. This is largely a group for whom the essence of artistic creation is solitary, individual, and/or
“sullen” and/or “nest like,” a community of inwardly directed folks (which is
not necessarily synonymous with shy. I speak as one of these people, and am
proudly introvert!), and there’s nothing wrong with that! Yet even back in the
days when I did many poetry readings (though I aspired to the kind of ‘in
between poem’ digressions that Creeley and Baraka often did; word-jazz), I was
skeptical about whether the standard ritual and/or institution of the poetry
reading did justice to the poems, and I know others felt the same way.
For me, what made a poem on the page such an experience is
that I (and I don’t think I’m alone in this) can spend more time on the
sentences and lines, and slow down time!
I can spend an hour on a poem that you spent 3 minutes reading at the reading
(which is much better than spending 5 minutes hogging up or “wolfing” down
something you spent 3 hours cooking), and intimately enter into a conversation
with it. I can go back and forth between two poems, in two different books, and
write while reading, bike around the block to decompress and them come back and
read it again. It’s like a solitary sublimated version of the collective moshpit
molecule dance, and the walls come a’ crumblin’ down (or are built again, more
beautiful, superior---of doors).
At the reading, by contrast, it’s more difficult to catch up
with words that some might say “slither while they pass they drift away.” I
could latch onto something you said in the third poem, but by the time the
reading was over I had forgotten and after the reading we talk and I’m like
“wow, there was something really great
in your third poem, but I uh…..forget,” and of course some take that as an
insult. Or I could sit there, or stand there, taking notes (Bruce Andrews would
show by example, and I appreciated that!), but some would take that as an
insult….
Ever notice how many times poets apologize if anybody in the
audience has heard a poem before, in contrast to musicians? Does anybody else
(aside from Kaya Oakes, author of “Why Poetry Readings Suck”) feel that the
standard (white) reading creates an event-matrix in which most of the audience
feels alienated from the essence of creation, as even perhaps does the one
performing his or her poem? And, what alternatives would you suggest? I’m
certainly not going to suggest making them On-line! Whatever negative I say
about the reading-centric culture, it would be even worse if made more
‘virtual.’
And I could get on my high horse and say that the standard
idea of a poetry community mediated socially by the “reading” promotes a
climate and a culture of glut, as if we would have been more glamourously,
intimately, and efficiently “fed” by the reading if, instead of reading 20
pages in the 20-to-30 minutes allowed, we’d perhaps read one or two pages and
then have a discussion about it. This form of distribution would honor the
“less is more” aesthetic that poetry often relies on. That does seem to happen
on special occasions (like when PennSound has those Poem-talks, and, the model
that collection Writing/Talks put
together in the late 80s still has potential), but I seriously believe the
poetry scene, as a whole, would benefit if we considered doing more of this. I
mean, if we’re gathered together to honor the writing, we might as well let the
writing come alive verbally (not to snuff out improvisation, but we could even
announce the text, or at least one of them, in advance, so people can come
prepared with questions).
And if you get to noticing that this starts to sound
suspiciously like a classroom, perhaps it’s an occupational hazard. Speaking
only for myself, I’ve found the creative writing workshop more collaborative,
collective, and communal than 99% of poetry readings. [1]I’m
not suggesting we entirely replace
the standard reading, but at least ask ourselves ways we could do better, to
supplement rather than supplant. Not that “getting” the words the way you do
when reading in solitude is always the most important aspect of the performance
if the sound of the reader can evoke a feeling, and, certainly, if the reading
includes music, to engage our bodies, I have no problem with not “getting” all
the words.
Maybe I’ll do a reading again, but I feel I need music, and
not simply phanopiea….. Music, at its
performative essence, makes more room for call and response, and is more
collaborative and democratic. Despite the much touted biopic stories or
legendary bands breaking up because of “egos” or “musical differences” (to say
nothing of record labels trying to play band members off each other to double
their profits), looking at the way music operates socially from the perspective
of “the poetry scene,” the fact that these bands even got together in the first
place almost becomes a superhuman feat of collectivism! That’s partially
because there’s a different ontology proposed than for poetic creation. Since
the creation of the artifact happens more collectively, on a de facto (if not
quite de jure, alas) level, there’s a more visceral democracy in which the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts; sure, our solitary art may have
helped prepare us for it, but it’s easier to break down some walls between
individuals as well as the audience and the performer.
But collaboration in poetry is generally considered a
novelty, or “something extra;” it’s a stunted art compared to music. It’s
certainly more difficult (if not impossible) to argue that it is the essence of
poetic creation, but maybe poetry readings or “poetry scenes” could benefit if
we encouraged more collaboratively written poems (combining lyric and narrative
perhaps). We could demand that every MFA program have at least one course in
collaboratively written poems (or that each graduate thesis must include at
least 20% collaborative poems), and there should be more book contests for
collaborative pieces. I believe such modest proposals could help combat the tyranny
of essentialism and individualism that so many poets, on paper at least, are
right to call out but that nonetheless haunts much of the literary world, on a
“poetics of institutional structural level” that many resign themselves to. It
could also help create a larger audience for poetry if you’re into that kind of
thing.
Feel free to argue with me, or to refuse, but I believe it
could have positive aesthetic and ethical consequences, even if we stop shy of
pooling our resources for a live/work/performance venue to help revitalize
local culture in an era when Big Tech is doing its best to destroy what’s left
of it. Or, I could get all manifesto like, and say, “we demand a moratorium on
all poetry readings that are not either dance shows, or organizational
meetings”—but it’s probably better to make it a character in a polyvocal poem
or piece of “flesh fiction.” Music, of course, is often an organizational
meeting even when it’s not (just as music therapy is often more effective when
it’s not called that), especially in times of cultural crisis, and, again, I
think of Kiyomi Tanouye, who perished in the Oakland warehouse fire of 2016.
She had a knack for creating multi-genre events in which introverts and
extroverts could meet from the ground up in which the poets don’t feel crowded
out by the dancers.
Chris Stroffolino
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