‘So that you will hear me’
April is turning out to be a dizzying whirl of a month. My trusty ThinkPad which saw me through many good times (and some really bad ones) faltered to an end last week — it was already a specialist in slowness but additionally, the screen hazed over and the adapter stopped working. I bought a new Sony Vaio. Now, I have to let go of the old and embrace the new, make it my own, stop looking at it as something I’ve borrowed for a while. I grow into things slowly. Even the shiniest, blingiest ones. Especially those.
But, but, but, the brighter, speedier machine could not have come at a better time. It’s National Poetry Month in the US and the internet is agog with poetic activity. It’s impossible to keep pace with everything that’s going on but I’m trying to snack on as much good stuff as possible, whenever I get the time. It’s a great reminder of what truly matters in life. Lots of people are writing a poem a day, here and here. The New York Review of Books is posting a poem a day from their archives and the website of the Academy of American Poets gives you a prompt a day at their workshop. Also, at Poetry Out Loud, Robert Pinsky is talking about reading poetry aloud and there are readings by contemporary poets as well.
So I was listening to some of the readings and it struck me (again) how hard it is to harness the twin talents of writing and performing. For example, I liked Linda Pastan’s ‘why are your poems so dark’ and Beth Ann Fennelly’s ‘Because People Ask What My Daughter Will Think of My Poems When She’s 16′ as poems on the page, but didn’t think they were read particularly well. Pastan lacks energy and Fennelly sounds strangely breathy at odd moments. On the other hand, Tod Boss does justice to his ‘Don’t Come Home’ and Kim Addonizio’s poetry may not be the greatest but one can’t deny she reads damn well.
Yes, poetry did begin as an oral art and it’s important for a poem to sound as good as it looks. But what if a writer is not a good performer? How much does the poem suffer as a result? After all, the two skills don’t always nestle side by side in the same person. Multiple factors affect the reading of a poem: diction, accent, inflection, energy, emotion, attitude. The poet’s personality. Most of all, that. Which also leads me to another question: how much does one like or dislike a poem based on what one feels about the personality (or rather, persona) of the poet?
There are lots of arguments about the written versus the performed poem and that’s not really my question here. I think both are valuable in their own ways. What I’m questioning is the premise that the enjoyment of a poem is always enhanced when the poet’s personality pops itself into the process, which some hold up as defence of poetry readings. For example, the Poetry Archive (one of the best places to listen to poetry), has this to say about poets reading their own work:
In this respect, it’s difficult to say a poet ever reads their work entirely ‘badly’. Even if they mumble a bit, or read ponderously, or at too great a lick, their delivery will still have important things to tell us about the links and separations between the speaking voice and the character in the poem, about its mood, about how the poet thought that sense would be communicated, and about how he or she hears it inside their own head.
But what about slips between thought and lip? I know people who are exceptionally articulate in their head, and expressive in their writing but when it comes to speaking or reciting, they fall short. Their tongues plod or trip at the wrong places. Their tone is casual when it shouldn’t be and portentous at an incongruous moment. Meter is misplaced. Meaning is fumbled. I’ve seen or heard this happen to poets as well.
Then there is the matter of shifting meaning. Neruda said, “And I watch my words from a long way off./ They are more yours than mine.” And it’s true of poems as well. Once someone reads a poem, it becomes more hers (or his) than the writer’s. Even if one accepts that a poem is a conversation between the poet and the reader, whose interpretation of that conversation trumps? Once I have assimilated a poem’s meaning into my bloodstream, do I really want somebody else (even the poet) to come along and say, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” And if someone does come along and say that, do I need to hastily correct my understanding or can I cleave to my original reading which was based on the purity of the words as they stood on the page — and nothing else.
During readings, some poets tend to contextualize their poems, explain why and how a particular poem was written. Does this amplify the conversation that’s taking place between the poet and the reader, or undermine it? If the poem communicates effectively, does it need the white noise of explanations, disclaimers, solemn appeals?
But I know that many listeners respond well to poets who do this. Words and their relationship with meaning, their ability to convey it with exactitude, lies at the heart of poetry. But there is work involved in reaching into the poem and taking what it has to give us. I think there is laziness involved in expecting a poet to caption or footnote excessively, to spice a poem with personal anecdotes or lace it with humour.
An old essay by poet David Groff at the Academy of American Poets talks about ‘The Peril of the Poetry Reading’:
The prospect of eventually reading a poem aloud can also affect a poet’s creative process. Looking to please the madding crowd, poets can unconsciously take aesthetic shortcuts that can damage a poem; the effects that work so well in performance are often the kind of schtick that deadens a written poem. Yet public readings can also serve as a poet’s bullshit detector. By tuning into the eyes, ears, and vibe of their listeners, poets can often tell whether the language or effect of a line of poetry is working. This can be a useful public version of the private reading aloud that good poets perform while revising a poem. Lazy poets can indulge in the opposite tactic, using oral skill and sheer velocity to throttle past the places they know are rough or cheap.
Though I think he’s much too harsh on poetry readings, I agree with some of what he says. There are poets so skilled at performative pyrotechnics that they manage to befuddle the audience. When you go back and actually examine their poems, line by line, word by word, you’re puzzled and a bit distressed because the written thing doesn’t live up to the performance. A performance may crackle or blaze because of personality. But on a page, words must be the fire.
Well, anyway, one needs all the joy one can juice from life so I like to read as well as listen. Here are some useful links: Academy of American Poets Listening Booth and Poetry Archive, which offers interesting ‘guided tours’ as well as categorization by poet, title, theme, form etc. There’s classic poetry read aloud (not by the poets themselves obviously) at Classic Poetry Aloud and contemporary poetry From the Fishouse and of course, there’s the BBC Poetry Out Loud which I mentioned earlier.
***
I’m sorry this has been long and rather rambling. It’s not meant to be an indictment of poetry readings at all (for anyone who didn’t catch that), more an ongoing exploration of the reading / performance of poetry versus written poetry.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:52 AM
How much of the performance and personality discussion is specific to poetry? When a theatre group performs Shakespeare, or a violinist plays Bach, or a jazz musician plays Gershwin how much are the words or notes “yours (performer’s) more than his (writer’s)”? It seems to me that poetry recitation is more akin to theatre performance, and nobody takes credit away from the playwright, or wants to hear the playwright spouting his/her own lines. People may wish they could hear Bach or Paganini play their own pieces, but that is because of their reputed virtuosity at their instruments: the same does not apply to Haydn.
As for personalities: we know almost nothing of Bach (he seems to have been rather boring); Beethoven was troubled, Wagner was proto-Nazi. But that doesn’t affect how we hear their works. Why should I care about the personalities of Larkin or Plath? (For that matter, why was the media coverage of Nicholas Hughes’s recent passing so obsessively focussed on his mother, when he hardly knew her but was close to his father all his life?)
On a not unrelated note, I came across this anecdote in a CD insert: when Debussy heard Paderewski perform his “Images” in Paris, he told the performer: “It’s not at all how I intended them to sound, but please, don’t change a single thing.” Would that sentiment resonate with poets?
Is poetry that different from other arts? Just wondering.
April 14th, 2009 at 7:22 PM
Oh but I loved this thoughtfully constructed piece, Anu. I have often considered the same things and remember being so deeply disappointed when I heard Arundhati Roy’s essays after reading them. I think we’ll find as many different reactions to poetry as there are people. Even on something as humble and not-really-representative as my blog, so many folks seek explanations while a few go with the flow of the words. And I, on my part, want to post them and vanish, and cringe when asked to deconstruct. Guess it’s a good thing I don’t have to do it as my day job! What about you–do you mind explaining/adding to your lines?
April 15th, 2009 at 12:48 PM
Sometimes it’s the mythic lionization that precludes any possibility of the original poet being less than capable of an excellent vocal rendering of their poetry. I mean, if any of those swooning 16 year old lit nerds (me included) were to know of Keats as less of a romantic ideal and more of sickly whinger, they’d gladly bang their heads against some colossal Grecian urns. On the other hand, when someone like Rives performs his work (and its almost impossible to trace his poetry in written form come to think of it) one can’t imgaine anyone else but him doing it so well. The fluidity of the piece is unhampered since the performer is the creator and modify it on the spot, for the kind of engagement he wishes with the audience. For someone else to do it, they’d need to familiarize themselves with his idiosyncracies. Not always an easy task. It works easier for another person to perform something they have not written, if the said poem(piece of music) is more structured and of a less eccentic nature; leaving little room for improvisation. Then again, that’s just a thought.
With jazz recitals, I have to admit, I am bored out of my head when they go overboard with “anecdotes” and then carp about the usual disinterest the audience displays in their tales. God’s tongue man! We came here for the music so why don’t you get on with it already and reduce all that nonsense about “the lovely little Venetian cathedral..”. (There is nothing lovely about Venice, it’s as morbid as an Irish woman’s attic. Just saying)
On a personal note, two incidents come to mind – My father introduced me to blues and jazz and I honestly, to some extend, preferred his performances to the original artists’. It had more soul. Either that or I was being biased. Heh!
Also, when I was 17, my pen was fuelled by a particular kind of drug fuelled rage and strongly believed that no one else could have performed the poemsI then wrote, except me. A few years later when I did some song writing for a friend’s rock band, I couldn’t bring myself to perform with them onstage. The lead singer took my songs and worked them so well, I found myself pleasantly surprised and I was partially glad that he had done it instead of me.
So, it works on both levels.
Okie. I rambled enough and made no sense whatsoever.
Btw, why a Vaio, why not a MAC? It’s far better an option.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:50 PM
Please ignore spelling/prep errors. I am punch drunk.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:54 PM
I think the issue of intention will always be central to a poetry reading. It privileges the performer’s (whether she is the poet herself or someone else) interpretation over anyone else’s. This is a problem, but not a problem that, in my opinion, needs to worry us too much, as long as we are aware of our limitations. Be self-reflexive, as it were. Also, a privileging of meaning does not necessarily imply a negation of other possibilities. That’s why I like the idea of having printed handouts given to the audience, so they can “go home with the poems” so to speak, and do what they like with them, including throwing them out.
Groff’s opinion is a bit too extreme for me to appreciate fully, but I like that he says, “Too often we are mistaking the poetry reading for the reading of poetry.” The reading of poetry is far more intense, and to me, far more pleasurable than a poetry reading. The public reading is an open door of sorts. You get an impression. You think you like or dislike something and then you go home and read it again. Find something you can wrestle with. The poem can inhabit both public and private spaces, rather than just the one. What you can access in one space (sound, the poet’s interpretation, tone, rhythm, “errors” in reading) you may not be able to access in the other, and what you cannot access (form, structure, line breaks) is visible to you on the page.
On the other hand, I don’t know what Groff has been reading or listening to. I can’t imagine poets taking aesthetic shortcuts to please an audience at a poetry reading. Whatever the popularity of reading events is today, you’re only a success if you’re published in print. Even electronic magazines aren’t seen as equal to printed ones, with a few exceptions. That’s just how it is. The ultimate test in the current scenario seems to be which editor likes your work and what sort of readership that magazine has.
There is a popular distinction between the page poem and the performance poem, with the expected overlap of course. A lot of poems work both ways. Groff may be right in saying that Language poetry does not fare so well at a reading. And much performance poetry is hard to read off the page.
I think we can have a category “poem intended for performance” (or assume that that is what “performance poem” means), where the poet knowingly incorporates dramatic, comedic, musical and rhetorical elements to enrich and guide the performance. It is intended for the stage, much like a play, although some may choose to read it on paper.
The other kind of poem, however, must lend itself to peformance or recording (what’s the point in having a poem that sounds bad?), but it’s on the page that you fully access the poem. The poetry reading is an open door that may take the listener to actually reading the poetry.
April 15th, 2009 at 1:13 PM
[...] Sengupta has an interesting post about poetry readings, the ways in which poets read, and how that affects the poem. Her post also [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 1:54 PM
Rahul: Hmm, poetry does seem to suffer from this more. For example, people do care an inordinate amount about the lives of poets, especially Plath for instance. Maybe because the words often have a more personal tone to them. Maybe because people look for autobiographical elements (the poetic ‘I’ is often taken to be synonymous with the poet). There’s a great deal of curiosity and vicariousness involved in consuming poetry, I think. I don’t think jazz, for example, suffers this. Or even a play. How much do we wonder whether Shakespeare was Hamlet, knew someone like Hamlet, etc. But everyone dissects how Plath’s marriage affected her poems or what drove Eliot’s religious zeal. There’s also the (erroneous) mythical qualities attributed to the poet (as legislator, visionary etc) that makes people more interested in them as personalities, beyond their art.
OJ: I tend to avoid contextualizing during readings but I’ve been told it’s a bad thing. I was once advised to model myself after another poet who preens and struts and talks a huge amount before reading. (We happened to share the same podium which led to this unfortunate comparison). So go figure! I prefer letting the poem breathe on its own though. But then, I also prefer writing to reading by a long way.
Scherezade: Chuckling at “I mean, if any of those swooning 16 year old lit nerds (me included) were to know of Keats as less of a romantic ideal and more of sickly whinger, they’d gladly bang their heads against some colossal Grecian urns.”…Why a VAIO? Simple. It’s way cheaper than a Mac. Poet/writer types don’t really make a lot of money, you know
. And punch drunks are welcome here. Other types of drunks also.
Aditi: Thank you for your thoughtful comment and for linking. Yes, I agree with you about the two being different spaces. I’m curious about how listeners view it though. And yes, the reading of poetry is far more intense to me too.
I’m not sure about this though — “Whatever the popularity of reading events is today, you’re only a success if you’re published in print.”
It sort of depends on what we qualify as success, right? Plus, in India, at least, I feel poets are more likely to be successful if they also read well. I’ve seen this play an important role in the popularity of some poets. But this is based on my limited understanding of the current scene.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:46 PM
Yes, it is hard to read personal meanings into instrumental jazz, and the lyrics to most jazz songs were written by professionals like Johnny Mercer who were not performers. But I wonder why the I in poetry is taken to be autobiographical, but not the I in novels. Also, some playwrights like Shaw used their plays as vehicles for their own opinions. It is easy to imagine Shaw endorsing everything Henry Higgins says, but who’d want to see Shaw play Higgins on stage? I suppose, as you say, it’s because of the image of poets as troubled romantic figures.
What Groff (and you?) seem to be saying is, a skilled performer can make a mediocre poem sound good, but a good poem should be striking even if you read it yourself. That’s another standard that doesn’t apply to music: you are not required to be able to play the music you enjoy. But what if you are not a good reader? (When reading silently, everything comes out in my mind as a flat monotone. I don’t think my audible reading is any better.) When I don’t like a poem on a printed page, can the problem be the way I am reading it to myself? If the original poet, or a talented performer, read the poem aloud and I liked it, I’d say the problem is with how I read it.
Good luck with the Vaio. Nice machines, though not the cheapest on the market. For people in some fields, a Mac is worth it for the software (which is a generation ahead of Windows), but if you don’t do lots of multimedia stuff it’s probably not worth the extra money… I use linux, mainly because it’s what works well for me, but many of my linux-using colleagues have switched to MacOS now.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:52 PM
MACs aren’t all that expensive these days. A “basic” model (by Apple standards) doesn’t burn a tremendous hole in the pocket anymore.
Ohwell. I am a Mac Evangelist of some sort, so I preach much.
Also I have gone barmy since having discovered that Rush Limbaugh is my father. But that’s too controversial a topic to delve into.
Do not remind me of poverty, btw. Social science graduates (especially those with a final year thesis on Sophocle’s facial hair) are the woodlice of the economic food chain.
And many thanks for welcoming drunks.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:47 PM
@ Anindita
“It sort of depends on what we qualify as success, right? Plus, in India, at least, I feel poets are more likely to be successful if they also read well. I’ve seen this play an important role in the popularity of some poets. But this is based on my limited understanding of the current scene.”
Heh, I think my understanding of publishing is even more limited, then. I don’t quite know how one get’s published in India. In the US and UK it seems more transparent, though one can never really say.
You’re probably right about how being a good reader gets you more popular. Maybe what’s needed is a good balance.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:59 PM
Don’t apologise for “rambling” — so much thought, reading and observation clearly went into this post! Thanks for keeping the conversation on page/stage going, and for all the links – shall chew through them at leisure!
April 27th, 2009 at 11:15 AM
Rahul: You’re right, it’s not the cheapest. I have to admit I tend to make these decisions in a very instinctive way and go with silly things like ‘which machine feels right to me’.
Scherezade: lol…the husband is a Mac
Evangelist too so I’m used to it.
Aditi: There are some Indian journals out there, though many are print. But I know what you mean.
Sharanya: Thank you!
September 12th, 2009 at 8:48 PM
I think you made some good points in Features also.