I'd like to end this blog week with some fun--a few clips from readings. The Poetry Reading is a strange event, since most poets and writers aren't trained performers, and they don't always live up to the moment. But when poet and moment connect, it can be mesmerizing. After that, I'll sign off with a piece about poetry readings from Phantom Signs, called "That Lamp Is From the Tomb."
A wonderful performance of a chapter of a very special memoir.
I love the way that H.L.Hix incorporates the works of Gwendolyn Brooks and W.S. Merwin (spoken by heart) into his reading.
One of the great poets of his generation, and a great performer and presence at the National Book Award ceremony.
Sometimes a reading has no text.
And sometimes, a reading has no words at all, and is transmogrified to movement.
That Lamp Is from the Tomb
Tonight I am not going to a movie. I have no Knicks tix. No backstage pass. I will not drift to a séance. Boogey to an orgy. No stumbling to an AA meeting for me. No rendezvous with a dark stranger. Tonight I’m going to a poetry reading.
I love poetry. I have spent my life in its thrall. But tonight I’m going to a poetry reading, and I’m not pleased.
And neither, probably, is the poet. Right now she is wedged in a Longhorn Steakhouse booth between a deanlet and a medievalist. She’s nodding and smiling, trying not to blurt, “Shut up, I’m thinking.” But no worries. Poets don’t prep. They sweat; they panic, but rehearsal? Not so much. In fact, practice just seems so . . . prosaic.
Deep in the mammal brain lurks the notion that the poetry reading should be spontaneous—the public viewing of an ineffable act. The audience can’t be there at the moment of composition, when the Muse swoops in, but they can attend this re-creation. So, a junior geezer saunters to the podium, coughs up a joke about Yogi Berra’s cellphone, and unfolds an encomium in which the words “risk,” “sublime,” and “Whitman” figure. I am of course not talking about a particular geezer. Nor a particular poet. I don’t even remember who’s reading tonight. I’m not complaining about the tall one slouching or the short one vanishing. I’m not calling out the head-bobber, nor the mic popper, nor the dropout from the Charlton Heston acting school. This isn’t about the paper shuffling or thumb-licking; not about the digressions longer (and stronger) than the poems themselves. This doesn’t have to do with the “I don’t know what this poem means because my friends haven’t explained it to me yet” or the “I can’t say much about this poem except that I was there when it happened.” I’m not squeaking about the querulous upticks and appropriated drawls. I’m not even complaining about the “How much time do I have left” black hole, or the way the room’s eyes bend to the front row where the geezer’s countenance remains regally composed. This isn’t even about the “just a few more” routine, and the fingerless math that ensues, everyone dividing the mean length of previous offerings by the cosine “few.” It gets dicey. After all, didn’t Homer use that ploy?
I’m resigned to all that. Still, I’m not pleased. It’s not that I haven’t heard some great readings. I’ve seen Lowell at 92nd Street and Pinsky at Black Oaks and Tess Gallagher at City Lights and Jorie Graham at Prairie Lights. I was at the famous Fort Mason fiasco when Robert Duncan went all Norman Mailer on the Language gang. I’ve seen Snodgrass play Henry Pussycat and Rothenberg swell to 6’6” and Baraka eviscerate Reagan (“Even Nancy Reagan wouldn’t be Nancy Reagan if she could safely be anyone else”). I was there when John Logan did his tribute to The Who, halting midpoem to hurl The Zigzag Walk at the amp. I’ve seen Carolyn Kizer unleash her inner Mae West. And Bill Heyen—who really is [DES: convert back to foot and inch marks instead of smart quotes]6’6”—called out a backrow yakker with, “You know you don’t really have to be here, Sparky.”
So, why am I going? To support the poet of course. More—to support poetry. Apparently, poetry needs support. Sales are thin. Grants are down. Outside the NCAA, poetry readings are the only events where the participants don’t even get paid. Poetry needs me. So I’m going.
But that’s not it, exactly. It’s not like supporting Hillary or the Yankees. There’s something else. Something just beyond volition. I feel like a child on Sunday morning. Skipping Mass was not an option, after the films of St. Teresa’s hell with the flames and squealing animals. Sleeping in was a one-way ticket to Danteville. Could it be that I bring a wisp of stale terror to these readings? I thought I shucked God the Father, but even shorn of beard and personhood, he may have infected me with a need for doleful liturgies.
I could go to a slam. Slam poets are funny. They get applause and laughs. They are stand-up comics with no punch lines. It’s a cliché to think that somehow this kind of performance is less artistic than literary poetry. Like literary poetry, slam offers an aesthetic experience of language. Like literary poetry, it elevates speech, inviting what William Stafford calls “a certain kind of attention.” It differs from literary poetry in its relationship to time, space, and the body. Slam poetry is fully here and now. It involves gesture, movement, even dance. It is choral. It is not less artistic; it is merely more present.
But I’m not going to a slam tonight. I’m going to a reading. And no matter how good, a reading really isn’t as much fun as a game or gig or fête or slam because the guest of honor, the star, the big ticket, the emperor of ice cream—that is, the poem itself—has left the building. It is gestured toward, invited, imprecated, implored. But it is never completely present. It cannot be wholly manifest in performance. It is dense and airy, intimate and elusive. We talk about the music of poetry, but if there is such a thing it can no longer be heard aloud. It must be seen on the page, refracted from vision to imagined sound, where internal rhymes and enjambed lines and intricate design can be apprehended, and music can be recomposed in the mind’s ear.
What a strange event this poetry reading is. It is a staging of what isn’t present, except in the hands of the poet: the text. Only she can see the chirography, can follow the line breaks and slant rhymes. She can’t render them, except with unnatural pauses or glottal stops or hand signals. But the poet doesn’t face the audience: she addresses herself to a fetishized objet: the book. Holding the secret symbols, she nevertheless occupies the same position as the audience: she experiences the work as listeners experience it, as if for the first time. In a sense, her reading is a reenactment. The poem is recomposed, and the poet is merely the agent, rather than the cause. The act is multi-dimensional: the reader, the audience, and the text.
After the reading, the triad reconfigures. The poet sits at a table behind a stack of books while the audience lines up to receive benediction in the form of handwriting—a defacement in any other hand is a sacrament when indited by the poet. But more than an autograph, which in the entertainment world provides proof of contemporaneity, the book signing is also a meta-communication. We want not just a signature, but a message. Since most attendees of most readings know the poet personally or share a quasi-professional relationship, the messages vary from the generic “Happy at our meeting” to the supportive, “With hopes for your own work” to the fulsome “Without whom . . .” She may even sketch a graceful glyph, the verse version of an emoticon.
Yes, the reading maps the process: from anointment by the geezer, to anecdote of inspiration, to a reenactment of composition, to the signing which confirms the transubstantiation from utterance to print, and finally to communion with buyers who are named and described in the very hand that composed the poem, reminding us that every book has at least one unfinished page.
Such labor, such panoply. Yet the poem remains at least partly absent. It is as immanent and elusive as another demographic notably missing: the dead. The vast majority of readers are alive, though not all of them seem so. Everyone loves the living. We are so interesting. So full of surprises. And here’s a living person willing to share an intimate (if encoded) account of her inner life. A rare chance. Even Language poets have an inner life, and reveal something at a reading, though not necessarily in the poem. Does her text have the qualities of art? Does it reshape the world? Will it outlive its maker? Maybe, maybe not. But the poet is alive, and she speaks and she is interesting to all of us who share her condition.
The dead, like the poem itself, are so achingly near, so desperately far. Their absence is so present. They occupy and do not occupy the empty chairs. They haunt the reading in the form of their poems’ ultimate completion, in their facility to render Blake’s “place at the bottom of graves where contraries are equally true.” In fact, it might be that a poem is merely a draft until it has passed through the breathless presence of the dead.
I suppose the real reason I’m going to a poetry reading tonight, and the reason I’ll come home and read poetry, and the reason I’m writing about it, and study it, and teach it, and am forever in its thrall, is because of what it is not. It’s not a performance, because it cannot be wholly experienced in one place. No one can follow a poem in one hearing—if you can, it isn’t really a poem. Nor can a poem be fully experienced on the page. There’s a reason for those thin sales. Reading a novel is a natural, fully satisfying experience (there’s absolutely no reason—besides prurience—that I will attend a prose reading. These should be banned completely).
Yet, the page is missing something too. The poetry book is such a poor, bare, forked animal. Sixty-four leaves of solitude: too long for one sitting, too brief for a love affair. Reading poetry alone always makes me feel so alone. Unlike novels, which inhale me, poems never take me out of my body. The acid coffee, the grocery list, the lustful twinge, the provost’s schemes, the specter of death—they don’t vanish just because my thumb and forefinger are pressed to the spine of Neruda’s odes. Reading poetry is disorienting, but not transporting. I feel a strangely present absence, a nostalgia for what never was. Undergraduates, the only members of the general population who read poetry, have a term for this experience. They call it “Bor. Ing.”
So, I’m not happy at a reading and I’m not happy reading. Oh my. Does poetry have no native means of apprehension? No presence in the sublunary world? Unlike painting, it cannot be completely appreciated by sight. Unlike music, it is not wholly manifested in sound. In fact, absence is at the heart of poetry. By eluding time and place, it somehow includes the experience of absence. It catalogs everything that happens and does not. Poetry is the finished thing which is incomplete. It requires belief in something beyond itself. God? Get real. Poetry requires a belief that within language, and outside of any particular iteration of language, there are possibilities that can never be attended at one time. They have one foot outside. They are beyond. They are what we used to call the Muse: not a persona, or a Star Wars Force, but a condition, a state of things. It flickers on the page and in the air. It circumnavigates the dead. And so I’m going to a poetry reading tonight.
But I won’t be wholly present. My reading will feature silent voices.
Bashō will whisper, “Even in Kyoto / hearing the cuckoo’s cry / I long for Kyoto.”
Pound will witness commuters dissolving to flower petals.
And Yeats’s pince-nez will glitter.
“They have loud music,” he’ll riff, playing air guitar.
“Hope everyday renewed,” miming a slam mic; “And heartier loves,” he’ll wail and gesture down the tower stairs.
Arm-in-arm Yeats and never-Yeats will stroll. Let them escort me to tonight’s reading. Let us be guided by a not-so-distant light.
“That lamp is from the tomb.”
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