Hi travel pal!
It’s almost six p.m., and daytime is only a glowing line of bright yellow clinging to the black hills of West Texas. We just rolled through border patrol, where a very nice female officer inquired about our citizenship. “USA,” we said, and she snickered. Me with my Apple laptop plugged via converter into the car charger, and the GPS system suction-cupped to the windshield telling us it’s “recalculating.” When she asked where we’re going and we said Marfa we got yet another eye-roll, my crazy-looking dog turning around in his doggie-booster seat and Josh flashing a charming smile behind his aviators and hipster-fisherman’s cap. Small artists’ community in the desert? Umm, obviously.
In this case, we were exactly what the officer expected. But during the trip today, with nothing—and I mean nothing—but scrub brush and the occasional metal pre-fab shed for a hundred miles at a time (what’s in those things, anyway?), Josh and I started talking about a particular unexpected phenomenon we sometimes witness: the terribly good or wonderfully bad poetry reading.
It all started because, between This American Life podcasts and naps, I sat in the passenger seat and read aloud each of the poems from the “56 Days” section of Kate Greenstreet's latest book “The Last 4 Things.” For those of you who know Greenstreet’s absolutely wonderful poems, they’re an eerie, disjunctive lot, full of recurring lines, reappearing characters and settings, random bits of dialogue between unknown persons and scarce little linear storytelling. Which, honestly, isn’t such an easy read out loud (though she does quite the job herself, as anyone who’s heard her knows). “The eye fills in what it knows,” she writes in one poem, but so does the ear. Surrealistic and leaping, the listener of these poems can never really anticipate what might come next, so the speaker has to slow down, stay focused, and, ultimately, use the voice to convey some of the emotional import and changes in mood the text attempts. I did my best.
I think this difficulty rings true for much non-narrative poetry, but also for any poetry read in public to an audience. And that’s where I declared a major problem I have with graduate poetry-writing programs in general: the lack of focus on public reading skills, as though those weren’t integral to our work as professional poets. As a PhD student, I’m not required (nor even encouraged) to take public speaking or drama courses. Nowhere in the curricula is it acknowledged that, because we poets have a devastatingly small audience matched by terrible underrepresentation in book stores, most of us will sell the majority of our books (if we’re lucky enough to publish some) at poetry readings. Shouldn’t that fact be considered when deciding what professional poets should learn in school?
Josh agreed that readings are important, but brought up an interesting point. Though we concurred on some fairly obvious ways that poetry recitations can fail (we’ll get to those later), Josh noted that a too-close focus on extremely stylized reading might suffer the same potential dangers as over-workshopped poems: a slide into the crowd-pleasing “middle ground” that might not actually work for every poet. While on the page the workshop mentality can lead to blandness, in a reading it would probably promote the dramatic monologue style reading, which is great for some people but wouldn’t work so well for, say, language poetry.
Still, when one considers how spoken word and slam poetry often manage to entertain even when the language, on the page, isn’t that exciting, it’s easy to see that good performance (which a poet can achieve in myriad ways, despite Josh’s fear) coupled with excellent writing is ideal. From Albert Goldbarth, whose performative, yet funny and tender reading at the Hammer Museum in LA last week just knocked me out, to my dear friend Eric McHenry’s humble, snarky and utterly charming bit two years ago at the Westchester Poetry Conference, to the sassy and sexy and stage-worthy recitations of Jill Alexander Essbaum, to the gorgeous spectacle of (hearing-impaired poet) Ilya Kaminsky’s roller-coaster intonations, I’ve seen remarkable poetry readings at all volumes and with all sorts of attitudes.
However, I’ve yet to hear a good reading where the poets:
1 – clearly didn’t care. I’ve heard so many of my colleagues say “I’m such a bad reader,” like it wasn’t a big deal; like it couldn’t be changed with some work and practice. I’m a little offended by this, honestly. People come to the venue, they take their seats and (hopefully) sit quietly and respectfully so that you might share your art with them. Don’t we owe people enough respect to try to do a good job, entertain them, or at least convey our ideas well?
2 – mumbled, didn’t enunciate or articulate words, spoke way to quickly or didn’t project at all. This is obvious. Poetry can be difficult enough to understand even when the listeners get the words. Help the kids out.
3 – over-explained the poems. Personally, I sometimes make jokes about situations or people in my poems before I say them. It’s my defense mechanism. But when a poet tells more than is absolutely necessary about a poem, it robs the audience of what Josh called “the pleasure of revelation.”
4 – had no stage presence at all. This can mean a few different things. Some poets shrink into themselves. Some ramble. Some seem scared out of their minds.
5—speak in a poetry voice. You know the one. The lilting up at the end of every line. The pauses in strange places. The absolute inability to realize that poetry (though not prose) is written in sentences, usually, or at least phrases, and might benefit from being vocalized as such.
6 – don’t understand their audience. When Jim Shepherd, an amazing fiction writer I just read for the first time this year, came to USC, we had a really funny conversation about choosing the wrong piece for the crowd. “Their eyes glaze over,” he said, blanching at the memory. Once fiction writers start a story, though, it’s hard for them to stop or turn back. As poets, we have the opportunity to cater our reading to the crowd, watch reactions, choose poems more on the fly depending on how it’s going. All it takes is a little observation.
Anyway, this is getting long, and I’m sleepy and full from a classically Texan dinner at the Cattle Ranch Restaurant and Lounge (where the clientele were all truckers, the chicken fried chicken was served with awesome white gravy, and the redneck-looking guy was—as generally happens—unfailingly polite and super friendly to boot.) So I’ll just finish by saying, there are endless ways to be winning, but the main one just seems to be caring about the audience, and realizing that what we do is an art of communication, whether on the page or in front of a microphone. And besides, I’ve always wanted to buy more books after good poetry readings than bad ones. But certainly none of this matters if the work isn’t good in the first place. So that’s obviously the priority.
Now, dears, your question:
What was the best reading you’ve ever been to,
and why?
For me it's a toss-up between two very good readings. If forced to rank them, the second would be Michael Chabon reading from Kavalier & Clay in Iowa City--all I could think at the time was how lucky his children were to have him reading bedtime stories to them--his tone, and slight changes for dialogue, were perfect. And the best would be Mark Strand, also in Iowa City, reading from Blizzard of One--Delirium Waltz was dizzying and hypnotic and, to an exhausted undergraduate, revelatory.
Posted by: TW | December 15, 2009 at 11:45 PM
I once left a Jorie Graham reading in tears. But I think I was a mess when I walked in, so who knows. Great post, btw. Still bummed I missed Greenstreet :(
Posted by: Kellianne | December 16, 2009 at 12:19 AM
I don't know what the best poetry reading I've been to is (I haven't been to enough that any could stick out as exceptional), but I'm definitely turned off by the Poetry Voice. I'd go hear you read sometime, though.
John Irving did a reading recently in L.A. and was amazing.
Posted by: Rachel | December 16, 2009 at 12:28 AM
In college, I went to a reading Jill Rosser gave. I learned there what it was I wanted to be when I grew up.
Posted by: Jill Essbaum | December 16, 2009 at 12:28 AM
The best reading I've ever been to? Tough question. Terrance Hayes the night of the first Kerry-Bush 2004 debates in Kalamazoo in October was pretty effing great. He read, "The Blue Kool" and sounded exactly like Kool Keith. Phil Levine and Galway Kinnel at the Ypsilan Theatre in Prague (2005) was great because Levine read his work in the same volume and tenacity that I imagine Zeus speaking in. And then there was Lucia Berlin (a little known but perfect teacher of fiction I have ever had at CU) who read in Boulder in 1999 and read "Unmanageable", which is as harrowing and beautiful a short-short I have ever heard or read.
-CT
Posted by: CT | December 16, 2009 at 01:31 AM
Hearing John Ashbery for the first time when he read to a filled to overflowing KGB bar crowd in 1997 was a revelation. (Really, people spilled into the hallway and hung out the windows on to the fire escape.) I had been reading Self-Portrait and dipping into his other poems but until then hadn't grasped the humor in his poetry. Also, while in college I went to a one-woman show about Edna St. Vincent Millay and the moment when the actress recited "First Fig" was transformative.
Posted by: Stacey | December 16, 2009 at 08:34 AM
you have to go through border patrol to get into west texas these days...?????
Posted by: bill | December 16, 2009 at 09:05 AM
I love these!
And yes, Bill, border patrol! The highways here takes us enticingly close to Juarez, Mexico, and I think Big Brother just keeps an extra eye on things in this area.
Posted by: Jess P. | December 16, 2009 at 09:52 AM
I would say one of the best readings for me was David Lehman’s 2004 reading at Otis College of Art and Design in LA. For two reasons: he was a great reader, but also I was both excited and relieved to find out that there was more to the poetry world than abstruse, minimal verse---and that a poet could be witty, even downright funny, actually write full sentences, and have people be able to relate instead of scratching their head and saying, “What the hell is that person talking about?!” or “When is this reading going to be over?”
Posted by: Amy Allara | December 16, 2009 at 10:28 AM
Hmmm ... I can definitely think of the WORST reading. Best is harder. I could listen to recordings of Dylan Thomas read all day - does that count?
Oh wait! I actually just remembered a real one. Saw D.A. Powell read up in Portland a few years back - absolutely incredible. Moving, intense, real.
Posted by: liz | December 16, 2009 at 12:33 PM
i thought maybe texas had finally seceded and i had missed it...http://www.texassecede.com/
Posted by: bill | December 16, 2009 at 12:57 PM
Thank you for the great compliment, Amy. I loved giving that reading & even more so knowing that it had such an effect on you.
One reading I attended stands out: James Schuyler at the old DIA headquarters on Mercer Street in NYC in, I think, 1988. It was his first reading! (He was incredibly shy and nervous.) Ashbery introduced him. The audience, and it was quite an audience, loved him madly.
Posted by: DL | December 17, 2009 at 12:17 AM
"...when one considers how spoken word and slam poetry often manage to entertain even when the language, on the page, isn’t that exciting..."
The best readings I've been to have included (or been composed entirely of) spoken word/slam artists. I've seen amazing performances by Sunni Patterson, Chancelier 'Xero' Skidmore, Anis Mojgani, Krista Franklin, Joaquin Zihautanejo...just to name a few. But beyond the stage presence, there is also serious skill exhibited on the page. There are many spoken word/slam artists who struggle just as much with their language as their performance. As a current MFA-candidate who struggles to balance my spoken word and page craft, I find that poets more comfortable with the page often use the idea of 'theatrics' as an easy label to dismiss spoken word. (Coincidentally, this is also a world they are often rather unfamiliar with, as it takes place largely outside of the academy...) There is less exciting craft everywhere—whether it be in workshop, literary journals, or PSI slam events. But while I ABSOLUTELY agree with much of this entry, I am also hurt by the alienation implicit in the quick dismissal of the craft behind spoken word. There are many artists who do both extremely well. And, yes, that is intimidating to those poets who might not have thought about tending to their own readings/performance.
Posted by: ZT | December 17, 2009 at 12:49 PM
I figured someone would pick up on that and start debating it, ZT. However, please note that I said "even when the language, on the page, isn't that exciting." Meaning that often a spoken word or slam artist can entertain the audience even *when* the language of a particular piece is badly crafted. It's not in any way a statement claiming that pieces in those genres are, by rote, poorly written. I'm not dismissive of or interested in alienating people who write in any genre, honestly. It just doesn't seem inclusive, open-minded or generous.
In fact, if anything, I'm actually saying that the addition of theatrics, or the performance element--whatever you want to call it--is actually an important and study-worthy aspect of craft. Which, when you think about it, is the point of this entry in the first place.
But, as an aside, I do happen to think slam/spoken word and poetry written primarily for the page are different genres. Not better, not worse. Different. The former REQUIRES an element of performance--without it, all good writing aside, a piece fails in that genre. Poetry for the page (though, as I've said, should ideally be read well when read out loud to people) doesn't actually require skills like, say, dramatic monologuing, which performance poetry does.
Also, I should note that I really like watching slam, and have seen some brilliant stuff. Taylor Mali knocked me out slamming at the Nuyorican a decade ago, for example. So good.
Posted by: Jess P. | December 17, 2009 at 03:16 PM
It has been a long time since I went to a poetry reading but then I was very impressed by the reader although I cant remember her name now (thats not good is it).
I myself though have had a few failures myself as my shyness seems to get in the way and is probably best read by the individual themselves.
Posted by: Angelr | December 29, 2009 at 04:17 AM