The NYT on poetry in performance, performance in poetry

The New York Times is at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe in a piece about poetry in performance. David Orr writes: "Poetry has a long tradition of being not only read but also performed vigorously and well, and 50 years after [Dylan] Thomas, New York is still one of the best places in America to hear poetry out loud, whether it’s being declaimed from a stage, whispered in an auditorium or shouted in a bar. All of which is in keeping with the history of poetry as an oral art." But the oral arts ain't everyone's bag. "'I’m not very fond of poetry readings,' Elizabeth Bishop once said in an interview, before relating an excruciating anecdote about an epically dull reading by Robert Lowell." The article forges on to conflate poetry readings with slam poetry, recalling Harold Bloom's definition of slam poetry as "the death of art."

Doubts persisted even as poets like Allen Ginsberg and Paul Blackburn placed more emphasis on oral aspects of the art in the 1950s and ’60s. But perhaps nothing illustrates the tension that can exist between private reading and public performance so much as the reception of spoken-word poetry in the mid-1980s, in particular spoken word’s competitive aspect, the poetry slam.

Slam was invented (or at least evolved) in Chicago as a populist response to what was seen as the increasing annexation of poetry by the academy. As a poetic genre it involves almost everything that would have put Bishop’s teeth on edge: overt theatricality, deliberate courting of the audience, and of course competition (sometimes of a freewheeling sort, but competition nonetheless). A slam, you might say, is often not so much poetry in performance as poetry as performance.

Though Orr doesn't quite get at them--mentioning only the Nuyorican, the Bowery Poetry Club and the 92nd St. Y Poetry Center, as well as a couple of smaller-scale series--the piece correctly states that "[i]f you live in New York, the opportunities to hear poetry abound." He attempts to locate the value in such hearing:

So where does all this leave Larkin’s objection that the reading of poetry can leave out, well, the poetry? It’s worth remembering that, as the poet Charles Bernstein smartly observed, the poem has “a fundamentally plural existence.” A poem isn’t purely a set arrangement of words on a page, if only because versions may differ. Think of Emily Dickinson’s unique typography being corrected by “helpful” editors.

Performance can create its own versions as well, and these, along with the words we read, give us the cloud of possibility that is the poem itself. In an e-mail, Paul Muldoon, poetry editor of The New Yorker, describes performance as “an act of creativity and criticism combined, as was the writing of the poem in the first place.”

Read it all here.