First off, a big yes to Livingston's post about Elizabeth Alexander's poem. It was an intentionally small part of a very big day, and the day wasn't about poetry. Poetry was a supporting cast member. Poetry will not be up for best supporting actor/actress. Move on.
Second off, a big no to Shields' comment that
contemporary poets don't stand a chance when reading their work before or after politicians or preachers. But I also noticed that both Obama and Lowery are not shy of being *orators*, while EA (like just about any contemporary poet who might have accepted the gig) completely avoids anything "oratorical" in her presentation.
It's not contemporary poets who don't stand a chance when reading before or after politicians or preachers. It's poets who actively avoid reading before the public and even look down their nose a bit at such an activity. I won't even say academic poets, which is where some of my colleagues (academic and bar-bound) would draw the line. I've heard poets in the academy who can read/recite quite well: Nikki Giovanni, Stan Sanvel Rubin, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath (holy shit does her reading of "Fever 103°" put a chill up the spine), Gary Snyder, Christine Hume. I'm not saying you have to like these poets or their work (Levine, for example, is a one-hit wonder, and Giovanni writes absolute drivel). But they can all read and not just keep an audience's attention - they draw the audience increasingly to themselves as they read. This of course leaves out contemporary poets known in large part due to their excellent performances/readings: Patricia Smith (who has straddled the page/stage divide like no other), Tracie Morris, Taylor Mali, etc. Again, maybe you, dear reader, don't like these particular poets, but they are contemporary, and they rivet listeners.
Third, and on the other hand, I really like the conversation taking place here on Shields' blog about the possibility of conversation among poets of differing aesthetics. The use of musicians as a metaphor is likely a good one, and I'm going to keep track of the various posters as they refine that metaphor into (hopefully) increasingly useful distinctions. Also, he brings in Borges in a smart way, and that always makes me happy.
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11 comments:
interesting, jeff. i know many people think of poetry as something to be experienced aurally, but i find poetry on the page, typically, more engaging.
and i've seen/heard some good readers: Terrance Hayes, Judson Mitcham...Natasha Tretheway.
whatever my personal tastes are, i believe that people are drawn into poetry by good and great readers.
i don't know if the same holds true for poetry on the page.
Hi Nancy,
I'd wager (not my life savings, but a decent wager nonetheless) that you find poetry on the page more engaging because most poetry these days is written for the page. Most of the poets we've listed so far are writing material that they happen to read well or that happens to work well aloud. I don't mean "happen to" as in "randomly," but in that the poems in question are not specifically designed to be listened to. There are a lot of commonalities between poems-intended-for-reading and poems-intended-for-hearing/viewing, but there are huge differences as well, and most poets don't account for them.
For example, and this is just a huge dichotomy that I use to start off discussions of performance - page poetry is spacial first and temporal second. That is to say, it all exists at the same time, even as we require some time to read through it. We can go back and make connections very easily. Performed poetry is temporal first and spacial second. You can't go back in time to re-hear something, and everything exists on top of itself (through memory of the space). That alone absolutely requires different considerations towards the audience, towards the aesthetics, towards the techniques.
Too many random examples from storytelling and poetry alike coming to mind, but I'll just toss out that I'm thinking about Beowulf as a poem designed for oral transmission. The obvious reason is the alliteration and other mnemonic devices (some of the kennings as stock phrases, for example). But there are more subtle things that make it better for hearing than listening, like the fight between Beowulf and Grendel. Something Seamus Heaney screws up completely is the wonderful use of pronouns and/or lack of markers in the grammar. In his translation, Beowulf is winning the whole time. In the Old English, you get lots of "he was pushed back" and "bones were breaking" without knowing to whom it's happening. That's a device that comes across as unnecessarily confusing on the page, but an excellent way to create suspension in a listening audience. Incidentally, I'm no expert/scholar in Old English, but this bit sticks with me from my semesters taking it.
Hey, have we come up with topics for guest-blogging yet? My mind is a sieve... :-)
maybe i just get tired to listening, because listening is what i try to do all day. still you make some compelling points.
guest post? what about something like what you wished you learned about poetry in high school/middle school but didn't? other ideas?
Nancy, I say we either use your idea - lessons missed in high school - or draw cards from a Trivial Pursuit game and use them as launching points, metaphorical or literal.
I'm glad to hear I bring in Borges in a nice way!
Andrew, you do! While I took issue with the oratory post, I think you're dead-on in bringing up Borges and the creation of our own predecessors into the conversation about SoQ/PA. It's less about who actually has x, y, and z in common now, or even about which of those approaches is honest/best/whatever, than it is about trying to establish the hierarchy of the future. And then a future Borges will come along and pull all kinds of disparate elements together into something bigger than all of us :-)
Perhaps it's not entirely clear what I mean by "oratorical," but your post made me realize that I'm not really sure myself what I mean by it. Or rather, I am sure, but I cannot really define it.
I certainly don't mean that there are no contemporary poets who could have read well in this context. And as many people have pointed out, it's pretty damn hard to read well to two million people and a global audience of a billion people, even if you are a good reader.
But my point is that even those who read well might have seemed less convincing than Obama and Lowery, simply because of the "oratorical" qualities of their delivery. Of poets I have seen, one who crosses my mind as perhaps up to the task is Galway Kinnell, who has a "weight" in his delivery that might have stood up to those two.
But imagine the reaction among "anti-SoQ" folks if Kinnell had gotten the nod for the inauguration!
jeff-
your idea is much better than mine.
i've had a hard time concentrating these days with our new president...can't believe it.
i don't own trivial pursuit. (i live a sheltered life...it was only in the last month that i bought my first package or jello)
you can draw my card and send me an email with details.
@ Andrew: Ah ha, now I've got you. I feel a bit silly, as your "oratorical" was in fact quite specific (and unlike the "oratorical" I've heard bandied about elsewhere). A style derived, in part, from the pulpit. I'll plug a post of mine for this: http://jeffstumpo.blogspot.com/2008/10/mic-check-presents-stephen-sargent.html. Steve's performances begin about 3:07 in. Or, if you just want a quick one, "Dream Away" at Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3shuqSAUt3A. So as to not embarrass Steve too much, the YouTube video is of him practicing. On stage at NPS 2007 he killed this piece, audience on feet and everything.
So the next question is, what would have happened had the poem gone over better than Obama's and Lowery's pieces? Put another way, was it beneficial to have something "off" such that the oratorical pieces played all the better against it?
@Nancy: Oh dear. I've got plenty of board games (if anybody nearby ever wants to geek out with Settlers of Catan, Citadels, Guillotine, Bohnanza, Munchkin, Ingenious, or half a dozen others, let me know). Amazingly, I don't own a copy of Trivial Pursuit. I'm Googling now for questions available online and will somehow randomly select some and send them to you :-)
Thanks for the link to Stephen Sargent, Jeff. I listened to the Youtube one, as the one on your blog was not loading at all on my computer, apparently. He's spellbinding. If EA had read like that, think of the effect! And poets on blogs would probably still have complained. :-)
Andrew, glad you enjoyed. Steve has the spellbinding/orator bit down pat. If EA had done this...I can't even imagine the reaction. I think the blogosphere may have imploded.
Sorry the file on my blog wasn't loading properly. Probably due to the video being 25 minutes long, your connection streamed it very, very, very slowly.
If you want to catch him in action with the rest of the team (we went to the National Poetry Slam together in 2007), check out the videos "Transformers" and "We control the vertical" in my album Arts & Crafts: www.jeffstumpo.com/stage.html. Smaller videos generally OK to stream, larger ones should be right-clicked and downloaded.
Last but not least on the Steve front, and I hate linking to this site for so many reasons, but there's decent footage of him at FameCast: http://www.famecast.net/backstage/artist.php?artist_id=3257. In season 2 Steve came in 6th of 80 poets, and I came in 10th. Huge problems with how the contest was (and continues to be) handled, so I don't recommend to anyone actually competing in it, but it's another look at Steve.
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