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!

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.