5 + 2 Performances =

Oscar Bermeo blogged the best list of influential works that I've yet seen. He went beyond the typical confines of the meme that made its rounds a while back, choosing not only influential poetry books, but nonfiction, recorded performances, and live performances. I won't try to one-up him here, but I would like to present 7 performances, live or recorded, that resulted in the version of me that gets up on the stage.

These first five occurred while I was an undergraduate. They set the stage (har har) for the style I developed in earnest later on at Revolution Cafe.

1. John Firefly. Open mic at the Underground at Illinois Wesleyan University. Various poems. John was/is a local homeless poet in Bloomington, IL. He was also the first person I saw really invest himself in a performance, really give life to the words on the page. I have a few poems of his that he mailed to me, including the one that got him banned from campus (let's just say he really, really insulted the then-head of the English Department). But it was that first open mic at which he cut loose that made me go, "Hmmm. Sound." What I most got from John was a sense that he was channeling words, even if reading them off the page, and using himself as an amplifier. It was a far cry from the staid readings I'd encountered before.

2. John O'Leary. Walking around IWU campus. Various poems of his own, plus passages from Milton and Shakespeare. Whereas John Firefly opened up the possibility of sound to me, John O'Leary brought home the concepts of memory and tradition. He wrote these fractured sonnets, as he called them, and revised them in his head. They worked on the page. They also worked out loud. Not only did he know his own work, however, but you could walk up to O'Leary, say "Paradise Lost, Book IV," and John would begin reciting it from memory. It was impressive, not gimmicky at all. I still haven't memorized as much work as I now know I ought to. You can listen to an interview with John on Cross Cultural Poetics #60.

3. John Firefly. Barnes & Noble Bloomington, IL. I invited both of the Johns to read at the Barnes & Noble at which I worked part-time during my undergraduate years. They arm wrestled to see who would go first, which drew a crowd. One poet, homeless, and another, looking homeless, about to burst blood vessels in the Starbucks. Firefly ended up going first, and proceeded to lead off with a poem about watching himself in the mirror as he had sex. Little old lady gets up and leaves. Followed by another. Followed by another. We had more complaints that night than any other in the history of the store. Lesson learned: words have power. Not always that lovey-dovey, power-to-move-you-positively power. But people will react even to poems.

4. Taylor Mali. Poems from the Like-Free Zone. "The the Impotence of Proofreading" and "What Teachers Make." Playful and smart, in the way that a young George Carlin was. Combine this with his attention to teaching stories (by which I mean both stories about teaching and stories that teach), and this wannabe-teacher was hooked on phonics. Or at least the presentation of potentially arcane material in such a way that the audience accepts and even appreciates it.

5. muMs da Schemer. Def Jam Poets at IWU. Everything he did (just kidding about the last of those three links - there was no classical music at the performance in question). muMs was a revelation. His theatrical style, use of persona, and the smartest sound poetry I'd heard to that point all made this guy my #1 influence when I started developing seriously as a performance poet. I don't give him enough credit on Arts & Crafts, and for that I'm genuinely sorry. He did one piece, whose title I can't recall, that ended with him miming an eagle, screeching, and slowly the screeching became beeping and the eagle an EKG meter flatlining. It was amazing, and "ADD TV"'s ending owes a lot to the ending of that piece. Actually, all of the four or five pieces I do that specifically explore opening and/or closing poems owe a lot to that piece.

These last two are performances that struck me not only for their incredible quality, but for the inspiration they gave me to create two of my most well-received poems.

6. Flying Words. Slope. "Language" (to see/hear it, check for the judges in the Slope issue). The first American Sign Language poem I'd ever seen that wasn't an interpretation of written/spoken words, but actually devised from the start to work with both spoken and signed language. Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner stand one in front of the other (Cook, the deaf member, in front) and co-sign a poem, while Lerner speaks from the back (his head is covered). Everything about this poem was intentional, from the way Lerner's and Cook's hands formed the sign for language (because you need two people to have communication), to the banter with the audience (at one point, three hands are engaged in playfully signing "poetry" over and over - while this is going on, Cook uses his free hand to point at someone in the audience and ask whether that person wants to get a drink later). It was kinesthetic, or better yet, kinaesthetic. "Sign of the Turtle" owes its specifics to Genelle and KellyLynn, but the manner in which I deliver it comes from Flying Words. I have a three-person ASL piece I want to perform some time that was inspired by "Language" as well. Some day...

7. Shira Erlichman. Famecast.com season 2. "Daddy's Parking Lot Sermon." I'll keep this one short, simply because I bring this poem up so often. The first time I saw it, I was checking out my competition in Famecast.com's Spoken Word contest (incidentally, I came in 10th out of 80 poets, but learned to seriously dislike Famecast's model - I recommend never, ever competing at that site). I immediately reacted to not just the delivery, but the poetry, calling fellow graduate students to come watch. I remember Roger Reeves pursing his lips and going, "Ohhh she's a real poet." This poem inspired "There will be no reinvention of the wheel." The bad male figure is the obvious link, but here's the real connection, the epiphany that I had that made Shira's poem more than just a good-creepy persona piece. You ready for this? Listen to the poem again, and realize that the "daddy" is using the exactly same kind of langauge as the son. Perhaps even more poetic language. There will be no reinvention of the wheel, indeed.

If you can find any of these people, live or in recordings, you owe it to yourself to listen.

Shakespeare's 99th

My favorite Shakespeare sonnet is #99. Not coincidentally, this is the one most derided by critics. Why, you ask? Because it's rough, even clunky. Because it has fifteen lines (some scholars have noted that other fifteen line sonnets exist, but this is the only one of Shakespeare's 154 to stray from the standard fourteen lines). Because the imagery is so very plain compared to most of the other sonnets.

But if you're trying to read through the sonnets in one go, or even over the course of two or three days, Sonnet 99 is a breath of fresh air. It's not perfectly crafted, every possibility thought out four steps ahead. It is, no matter its faults, different, and that is absolutely necessary. I only wish it came earlier in the sequence.

This isn't so much in praise of imperfection as it is of difference in texture. I would praise imperfection, but that could unfortunately lead to some of the art I saw last Friday in downtown Portsmouth. There were three galleries we visited with wonderful art. But in one of them, even the mistakes appeared calculated. Which meant that in pieces of art that were utterly controlled, even the errors were controlled, which meant there was no tonal shift, just the appearance of one.

One reason I love open mics is because of the shift in texture over the course of the evening. Wednesday night at the Cantab was wonderful. The open mic didn't have quite the variety one sees at a good Mic Check, but I also grant that even Mic Check doesn't always have that variety. That's the nature of an open mic. But there was an old man, perhaps with Parkinson's, acting out the first scene of his one act play (I'm not sure any of us could make sense of it). There were first-timers talking about love and hate and the usual, and sometimes managing to spark their language from what could be burned-out materials. There were regulars who did free verse, sonnets, LangPo, and more. There were poets responding, through poetry, to other poets' works. And at no point during the open mic did everybody sound like everybody else. Sure, there was overlap, but we got about 2 1/2 hours of widely varying material.

Then came Shira Erlichman, who doesn't sound quite like anybody else. At some point I should do a blog post just on her work. Seriously. She's got a successful style and rightfully so, but she understands, as a feature, how to vary her poems such that the texture shifts. Serious to funny, lyric to narrative, abstract metaphors to concrete details. She never gets so entrenched in her own "voice" that it becomes background noise.

Unfortunately, that's what happened for much of the slam. I'm not saying this as sour grapes (I got my ass handed to me - but I generally do in slams). Rather, the poets who competed and made it to successive rounds sounded like slight variations on themselves in those successive rounds. The guy who won absolutely should have won, though the woman he knocked out in the second round was pretty good. But even he found a voice/style that made the judges like him, and he kept doing that thing. I realize that's part of the game of slam, to find a winning strategy. But as someone who still holds out hope that there is artistic value in the very process of slamming, I want to see more people take risks in the slam itself. Once you've won the audience's favor, see what you can do with it. Risk that favor such that you give the audience something they were not expecting.

On a similar note, that is, texture, I've been reading Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse by Darcie Dennigan lately. It's the latest winner in the Poets Out Loud series. My friend Karin Gottshall is a previous winner. I find that I can read Karin's book Crocus in one day, not because the language is easier (though it is), but because the book is more textured. The words never become so consistent that they fade to page. This isn't to knock Corinna - I am blown away by various poems so far and immediately purchased the book upon reading a few in the bookstore. But it's not the kind of book I can read more than two or three poems at a time. Am I just expecting the wrong thing from it? Is it wrong to want a sore thumb, a scratched coin, an error in the middle of the book?