Comments on: prosopagnosic poetics, or facing up to oneself

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:55:14 +0000

I’m a fan of Craig’s work–I have taught a number of poems from Shells over the years (the terrific double sonnet Artichoke, and his hilarious Sapphics for example)–and we had the privilege of hearing him read/perform his work here in Athens a year or two ago. Still, I think he is atypical of the scene…
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By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:24:00 +0000

I’m sure I was being complimented too– I hope the questioner, whose name I never got, wouldn’t mind my using her query as a jumping-off point in this way.
Alicia, in answer to your question, there’s at least one poet who has done a lot of standup competitive performing, and who has won slam awards, and who has won an old-school book contest, and who uses lots of rhyme and meter, and who certainly has more in common with (say) Millay, McKay and Frost than with anything from a stage-based tradition: that would be Craig Arnold. I wonder if he’s reading Harriet?
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By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:18:42 +0000

Steve:
You’re absolutely right to note the presence of the Nuyorican in New York, the Chicago poets and Smith, the Last Poets, etc. I don’t think that’s a narrative that gets told too often, because whether unconsciously or not, people tend to equate the rise of slam poetry with the rise of spoken word.
To their detriment (and the result of my frequent bouts of head-pounding-the-wall frustration), the Nuyo Cafe has not done anywhere near what is needed to separate what Bob Holman did for them as a slam venue from the work their writers did previous to 1990. And because I live with a Chicago poet myself, I know that there was a scene for black writers before slam really took off…and even when slam hit, they didn’t always flock to the Green Mill. Maybe I’ve got more to read, but we must always be conscientious of what is considered conventional wisdom when it comes to these kinds of histories. Speaking of which, I’m going to re-read some of what Patricia said about this stuff…I’m pretty sure there’s something in the PF archives.
I think there’s a point where the poet must let the poem be what it is, in whatever form it chooses to take. Whenever a poet says “A poem is THIS…” someone comes along to defy it. Which is how it should be, I suppose. In the air, on the page, the poem is still the poem, no? It sounds like Hopkins understood that to some degree, or at the very least was trying to come to terms with it.
All that said, I wonder how miffed Ernest Thayer was when “Casey At The Bat” became a vaudeville act…
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:42:45 +0000

Hope your Thanksgiving went well, and there were no awkward non-recognitions! (My own involved a long day of running all over town to find imported red sweet-potatoes rather than the native grey Greek variety, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to bring to a Thanksgiving dinner here…)
I was pretty active in the spoken-word scene in Atlanta in the mid-1990s. I have always been a little surprised a the snobbery of academe towards it–I guess my feeling was, if you think the poetry is bad (and few academics came down to the open mics anyway, so I’m not sure how they could judge), why don’t you come down and read some “good” poetry–show people how it’s done. Admittedly, the spoken-word scene in Atlanta in the mid 90s was not a huge slam scene–it was pretty much an uncompetitive sport–and while there were some serious and excellent performers, it really was more “spoken word.” I am also kind of surprised to learn that performance poetry is somehow marked as nonwhite… maybe it is, I hand’t thought about it that way. Two things did surprise me when I was involved in it–I was surprised there were not more poems with formal elements–rhyme, meter, that would aid memorization–and I was surprised how male-dominated it was at the time. I was told by an organizer at one venue I was very active in (Cafe Diem), that my appearances had marked a shift in the event. Not, it turns out, because I was declaming sonnets, but because I was female, even though the audience, most of them writers I assume, was pretty fifty fifty. And it was actually through the spoken word scene that I met Harriet-poet Jeffrey McDaniel, when he was running an open mike at the Black Cat in DC…
Well, it was good practice for performing generally, reading over capuccino machines and the occasional heckler, being willing to perform anywhere–Lollapalooza, cafes, bars. I found it helped me hone poems, too, to be more direct, eschew certain eleborate decorations, admit of more humor. I still find reading new poems aloud a vital part of my process–I can tell instantly where something goes slack, I can tell when a risk has payed off. (Not every poem is designed for reading aloud to every audience, of course, and I try to “read” my audience as well as my poems.) I guess I have great faith in audiences. But at the same time I am really writing for that silent reading on the page, too. I am not keen, for instance, on recording poems at internet sites, since I’d rather the “reader” hear the poem in their own still small voice. So I guess I want to have it both ways…
I’m sure your questioner was complimenting you!
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By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:10:37 +0000

Dear Rich:
From what I’ve seen, the popular accounts of the rise of what now gets called performance poetry in the United States, and of the rise of the poetry slam (not the same thing) are connected to African-American writers in Chicago (such as Patricia Smith), to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York (whose name blends “New York” and “Puerto Rican”), and to strands in early hip-hop or proto-hip hop (e.g. the Last Poets). So, yes, I think it is marked as nonwhite. Of course there are many white folks who have a right to call themselves performance poets, and like almost every art form in the United States it’s been built and altered by people of many colors and backgrounds.
You can believe in the Grossman version of poetry as the presentation of an absent face without thinking that poetry must thereby lose its oral qualities, or you can think the loss entailed by the account: it depends what you take “oral qualities” to mean. (G. M. Hopkins, whose poems have lots of oral qualities, thought of poems as in some ways analogous to scores in classical music: texts meant for performance by the reader, not necessarily in public or out loud: at least one very eminent living critic has endorsed exactly that account.)
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By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:52:22 +0000

Performance poetry is marked as non-white? Interesting…not the first time I’ve heard it, but I’m curious as to why you’d think that. And I’m sure there’s more than a few white performance poets who would be curious as well.
Like Patricia, I came from slam, so I do think about the poems as they happen out loud. But that’s also an offshoot from how poetry was unfolded in my house growing up. My father, who is Cuban, never read a poem to me in his life…he recited them out loud, from memory. When I was older and able to seek these poems out in print, even if I put the text of a poem in his hand, he’d have to read it out loud. I think that root orality, along with a desire to wipe the floor with some of the weaker poets on stage, initially attracted me to slam. (Juvenile, I know.) So I come to poetry through the ear first and foremost.
For me, the act of committing a poem to page seemed more like an archival tool than anything else. When I came across certain poets later, I found that the page really did have a life of its own: this struck me especially with geniuses like Mark Doty…a fan of Bishop who, incidentally, is highly compelling to hear in person. At the same time, attending one of the centenary celebrations for Pablo Neruda in 2004, I was struck by how Neruda was able to fill a space with sound in a manner bordering on religious ritual (we heard a recording, granted, but I honestly think the quality was in his voice more than in the PA system).
It’s like you say, at some point we seem to have lost the essential oral qualities of poems. I’m still a student, so maybe I’ll find out before too long.
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