Performing the poem

An interesting exchange came up at the Writing Across Cultures symposium I attended recently at the City University of Hong Kong, which brought together writers from around the region under the Adelaide-based Asia Pacific Writing Partnership.

Two poets — Chinese American Marilyn Chin and Chinese Australian Ouyang Yu — found themselves on opposite ends of a discussion about how poetry should be read, aloud and in public. Ouyang opened the issue by mentioning how the American poet John Ashbery read his poems in a flat drone — precisely, Ouyang said, to accentuate the value of the words themselves. (It reminded me of how T.S. Eliot supposedly preferred the typewriter to handwriting where poetry was concerned, because it imparted a kind of objectivity to his language.)

Marilyn — herself a wonderfully expressive, even explosive reciter of her own poetry — took exception to Ouyang’s position, saying that no such rule could be imposed on poets and their work. Presumably, much depended on the poet, the work, even the audience and the venue.

I agreed with Marilyn’s openness to all kinds of possibilities — and I’m sure Ouyang didn’t mean to be prescriptive — but I also sympathized to some extent with Ouyang’s disinclination for the overly dramatic. Having attended quite a few readings and performances here and abroad, I’ve seen and witnessed a slew of styles and practices, and have met some terrific readers and performers — among them, at a festival last year in Singapore, the performance poets Arianna Pozzuoli, George Wielgus, and Arka Mukhopadhyay. All three poets used nothing else but their voices and their bodies, and — unlike some performances — the theatrics never drowned out the words and their fundamental integrity. (Here, we have poets like Ricky de Ungria who have mastered this kind of art after another art.)

I suppose it helps to understand that poetry readings today are no longer just that; “performance,” “spoken word,” and “poetry slam” events have taken over what may have been, in bygone days, a genteel rendition of Edna St. Vincent Millay or Daniel Rossetti beside a piano. Poems are performed, not just read or recited. They mutate and take on new meanings in smoky bars and makeshift theaters, playing to raucous crowds who may never have heard of nor would give a hoot about the likes of W.H. Auden. There’s a combustible energy to these performances that novelists and essayists can only dream about and long for.

Many poetry performances are, however, anything but.

I have to admit to being annoyed by poets who choose to read poems that are difficult enough to be read on the page, and who then read these conundrums in a soulless, opaque mumble.

On the other hand, I dislike the breathy tenderness and the affected lyricism with which some poets seek to mask a basic poverty of substance or try to cadge more emotional mileage out of a sappy poem. (You know what I’m referring to: it’s when the poet trails off huskily into the aural equivalent of points of ellipsis, otherwise known as those three dots that often follow words like “love” and “forever” and, while we’re at it, “September.” That works for some poems or lines but not always.)

Neither do I care much for overproduced choral or dramatic “interpretations” that suspiciously look and sound like the classroom group assignments they are. Often a line is best left alone.

A good voice helps, but it’s optional and sometimes even counter-productive, when the poem demands a rasp that comes from a gin-gutted throat or a lilt from a giddy debutante. Some days you’d rather hear Rod Stewart than Julio Iglesias (and maybe some days neither). The more important thing is the genuineness of the sentiment in the voice, and above all, the communicated sense that the reader truly understands what he or she is reading.

 I’ve also noticed how some Pinoy poets, probably after attending some readings in the US, have begun reading their own work in the interrogative mode, where each line curiously ends sounding like a question, with a vocal uptick — making me go, “Eh?”

But I reserve my deepest dislike for those poets (and fictionists and paper presenters) who read on and on, especially in a timed event involving a given sequence of readers with, say, 10 minutes each onstage. It amazes me how many readers blithely ignore the fact that those 10 minutes include their introductory spiels, their restroom or smoking breaks, and whatever else they decide to do besides reading their poems.

I’m being an old fogey about this, but I still believe in respecting time limits as one of life’s great courtesies. If there’s anything that most multi-speaker conferences and readings suffer from, it’s poor time management, with the hapless, outranked moderators unable or unwilling to stop Professor Motormouth from trotting out yet another tale of his carefree youth.   

Like my coffee, I prefer my spoken word strong and robust, its stored energy lingering in my belly and in my bones long after the first sip. Strong doesn’t always mean loud — I hate stridency and screechiness as well — and it doesn’t always mean clear and certain; doubt and ambivalence are exquisite qualities to communicate through the inflected word. The spoken word itself should be spoken clear, but its meanings can be richly textured. The poem itself should be as compelling whether it’s read by someone from Prison Break, CSI, or Project Runway.

So here we go: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state….”

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Speaking of poetry, the Dumaguete-based poet Myrna Peña Reyes, with whom I had the pleasure of serving on the Silliman Workshop panel, sent in this word of caution about the dangers of over-revising, in response to a piece I recently wrote on how a writer’s language changes over time: “I agree wholeheartedly that writers should form the discipline of editing themselves scrupulously; they should be their own harshest critics.  While young writers do need to learn to clean up their language, there is a great deal to be said about freshness and spontaneity that can be missing from the works of more mature writers.

“The lyric impulse is what’s usually curbed in older works.  For poets especially, this is a concern to be balanced carefully. Music is intrinsic in the language of poetry and, to a lesser degree, in prose, whether it be in exuberant outbursts of song and sentiment or the more measured introspections on ordinary, every-day existence.  The challenge is not to sing unrestrainedly nor to end up writing too controlled ‘pedestrian’-sounding poetry or prose. One should learn control but be wary of over-control.  A heightened sense of language is always present in effective writing.”

Well put and many thanks, Myrna — see you in May in Dumaguete!

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.