Perils of the Poetry Reading

Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don't have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it, but at a reading, the poems whizz by unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks, are absent. A stray thought enters my head -- I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I've lost the thread. (I'm speaking of what you might call "literary poetry" here, poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

I often find that the poems I've enjoyed most at a reading seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book. What made the poem seem striking and fresh was the poet's performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves. Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa, and when he ran off with the Methodist minister's wife my aunt killed all the chickens and gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, "Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens." it's been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet's career, has actually changed the way poets -- "literary poets" -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It's the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian.

Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of poetry's audience rather than poetry's readers, which tells you something right there. It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote. I've given readings at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let's just go have a beer and talk about health care reform.

Wislawa Szymborska's "Poetry Reading" (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh) may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful, humiliating worst. To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel ("The food is terrible!" "Yes, and the portions are so small!"), the audience is not only tiny, it's not even listening. And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing, that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world's indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds?
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining,

the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave,
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave.
Dante's Inferno is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet,
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life,
for lack of muscles forced to show the world
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore:
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more,
she's making him that tart she used to bake.
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

***** The Mind-Body Problem, poems by Katha Pollitt, is just out from Random House.

Comments (5)

1. EULENSPIEGEL'S HALLOWE'EN

   We make microscopes to peek at tiny marvels and telescopes to scan enormities bit by bit, yet the human eye is strangely sightless when it comes to preventing manmade horrors. Intimidated by experts, we tap a cane ahead and step into nuclear wars, pollution, fearsome flirtations that risk the earth's fragility. We leave it up to think tanks to persuade and governments to steal from sick, sad, needy people in order to endow NASA whose jet propulsions at this very moment have already rocketed to bomb the world's moon. Without asking anyone's okay, it will orbit till October 9, then explode in a crater, and 350 tons of debris will rise. Lack of "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind" marks this venture as curiosity gone wild -- a "because it's there" urge to exploit, to penetrate, that is truly vile and selfish. Yet to object seems foolhardy, so acceptable has aggression become. I feel a deep despair. My soul is illl-at-ease. Such an invasion, dressed up as science or truth, is actually rape of the Mother of Evening, friend of wolves and lovers, keeper of time and tide.

   Jean Gerard, 1558 St. James, Cambria, Ca 93428 805-927-3331 (Note: This is actually a poem, but the space provided is not sufficient to set it up that way.)

   Posted by gezelda at 08/30/2009 @ 5:25pm

2. EULENSPIEGEL'S HALLOWE'EN

   We make microscopes to peek at tiny marvels and telescopes to scan enormities bit by bit, yet the human eye is strangely sightless when it comes to preventing manmade horrors. Intimidated by experts, we tap a cane ahead and step into nuclear wars, pollution, fearsome flirtations that risk the earth's fragility. We leave it up to think tanks to persuade and governments to steal from sick, sad, needy people in order to endow NASA whose jet propulsions at this very moment have already rocketed to bomb the world's moon. Without asking anyone's okay, it will orbit till October 9, then explode in a crater, and 350 tons of debris will rise. Lack of "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind" marks this venture as curiosity gone wild -- a "because it's there" urge to exploit, to penetrate, that is truly vile and selfish. Yet to object seems foolhardy, so acceptable has aggression become. I feel a deep despair. My soul is illl-at-ease. Such an invasion, dressed up as science or truth, is actually rape of the Mother of Evening, friend of wolves and lovers, keeper of time and tide.

   Jean Gerard, 1558 St. James, Cambria, Ca 93428 805-927-3331 (Note: This is actually a poem, but the space provided is not sufficient to set it up that way.) email: jeangerard@charter.net

   Posted by gezelda at 08/30/2009 @ 5:26pm

3. 1Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

   2Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

   3Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

   4Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

   5For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

   Posted by BigPasture at 08/31/2009 @ 12:47am

4. One of the reasons why poetry is difficult to understand is because many (but not all) so-called modern poets have recently strived to make this form as different as possible from both prose and ordinary speech.

   Prose is easier to understand because it is like ordinary speech, but with extra words and punctuation added for clarity. Some contemporary poetry, notably much of hip-hop poetry, strives to be authentically ordinary speech, which makes it much more easily comprehensible, and much more popular, than most other so-called modern poetry.

   Every so-called modern genre tends to strive toward extraordinariness and novelty. This tends to make it difficult to understand. The poet must choose either on the one hand to be easy to understand, but rejected as unoriginal, or on the other hand to be original, but obscure.

   To some degree, this has been true ever since "modernity" began, if one understands this artistic affectation to be the tendency to value innovation and originality over everything else, including clarity, loyalty to tradition, and mass appeal.

   Understood this way, we might assume that modernity emerged only recently, but in fact, it is as old as the Psalm in which an otherwise traditional lyricist proposed to "sing to the Lord a new song."

   Posted by JakobFabian at 08/31/2009 @ 08:29am

5. 'National Poetry Month Raises Awareness Of Poetry Prevention

   NEW YORK--This month marks the 10th National Poetry Month, a campaign created in 1996 to raise public awareness of the growing problem of poetry. "We must stop this scourge before more lives are exposed to poetry," said Dr. John Nieman of the American Poetry Prevention Society at a Monday fundraising luncheon. "It doesn't just affect women. Young people, particularly morose high-school and college students, are very susceptible to this terrible affliction. It is imperative that we eradicate poetry now, before more rainy afternoons are lost to it." Nieman said some early signs of poetry infection include increased self-absorption and tea consumption.' -- The Onion -- 27 April, 2005 -- http:// www.theonion.com/ content/node/33085

   Posted by HonestLiberal at 08/31/2009 @ 08:42am