What is performance poetry?
Or what is not…
I had my first of three chapbook release readings last week1 and it was great being able to do new work live again, and for one of the first times since the pandumbic started. In the past I have referred to myself as a “performance poet” instead of a poet because of how much I think about how my work will be performed. Which is different than a poetry reading. At least it is to me. Anyway, I like readings and performings.
But what separates performance poetry from page or “vanilla” poetry? Lookee here!
The Vehicle
Let’s just consider how the different sub-genres are delivered to audiences. Page poetry is usually received on a small white rectangle called paper (or on a screen with animated star gifs called LiveJournal). Performance poetry comes from, usually, a human body with guts and bones and fingernails and stuff. And while I continue to become more and more rectangular as I age, I still cannot fit into a book.
These differences alone make the two artforms radically distinct. A page can play around with line breaks and font and spacing and everything else in what Charles Olson would call the FIELD. As a means to transfer idea or energy from poet to reader, the page is a boundless cosmos of artistic potential. But a page can never do what a human body can do (e.g. speak, breathe, have a soul, etc…). And while human bodies can become page-like via tattoo or sharpie, I bet you would feel differently reading lines off of someone’s hot skin than you would reading those same lines off cold paper.
However in performance poetry, the human body isn’t just a jambox that a poem emits from its mouthspeakers; the human body and how it sounds and moves IS the poem. Our bodies are the poems as much as the words our bodies say. More on this later.
The Venue
I think a lot about how poet Dean Young once said that poems can never be performed because the act of consuming poetry is a private, prayerful matter. (I’m paraphrasing, perhaps unfairly) but the argument goes that what a poem IS relies entirely on the solo reconstruction of the experience of one reader. Therefore, a poem performed in front of other people is something else, not a poem. The mere presence of the actual poet with an audience of more than one other person, therefore, disqualifies it from poemdom.
This seems to me to explain how HE enjoys and views poetry. He and the folks in his loosely affiliated school. I have greatly enjoyed the private, prayerful experiences I have had with Dean Young poetry, but I have also sacrilegiously enjoyed performing his poems to a group of people. And those groups of people, together, communally, shape interpretations and experiences of his work that would be impossible alone. It’s not better or worse, but it’s different, the experiencing of art communally or individually.
David Byrne in his (god help me) 2010 TED Talk discusses the ways in which architecture shapes in fundamental ways the composition of the music that is meant to eventually be played in it. That the venue (or as he also calls it “vessel”) is something of a co-author of the work, (mostly) unconsciously directing what kind of music gets created. For instance, I don’t particularly like Mumford & Sons, but I feel like it’s not just a change in aesthetic interests that shifted the way their songs sound now compared with how they the songs sounded before M&S became insanely famous.2 Their bluegrassy banjoing, while fine for small to midsize indoor venues, probably doesn’t sound super great or distinguishable in enormous stadiums built for footy. So they started writing (echoey, less distinct) songs that did fit that setting.
Byrne points toward how this venue-as-coauthor is about more than architecture and music. The context a piece of art is to eventually be consumed in shapes the art that is created BEFORE a first draft is ever made. As he points out, birds will create songs (evolutionarily, over millennia) to suit both their habitat and geography. Even birds of the same species will sing differently depending on where they live.
This applies here, then, to the fact that Dean Young was probably writing poems for people who would be privately reading them on thin white rectangles who would have the appropriately calibrated historical and cultural grounding to appreciate the surreally way he organizes these letter and word things into what he calls poems. And this was happening subconsciously without his permission, probably. And that’s FINE.
But I am wary of those who guard the borders of genre, who feel comfortable saying “that’s not poetry.” Lots of people have said that punk rock and hip hop aren’t music and those people are universally understood to be assholes3.
All of that to say, performance poetry (of which you can include the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, and The Iliad and The Odyssey), are poems designed to be heard by groups of people gathered together. They are written, perhaps unconsciously, to be heard from a live human.
Time
Like any live show, performance poetry happens in spacetime and is subject to all the laws of the physical universe. The poems make sounds in the air and unless you are very rude, you cannot stop everything and ask the poet to go back and repeat themselves. Even if you read a page poem aloud, you can still go back and read it again to deepen, complicate, or otherwise enrich your experience of the poem (Harryette Mullen’s “Any Lit” comes to mind as a poem that essentially needs to be read more than once). Performance poems only ever happen once and you have very little control over the way it unfolds. And even if you see the same performance poem again later, if you change the venue and the atmosphere and political climate or any other factor, the experience/meaning of the poem might be totally shifted. Similarly, if you read the text of a poem that was performed, pore over its construction, read it aloud to yourself, that is not the same performance poem as the one that was read aloud. Performance is ethereal. Like LIFE4.
A seat at the table
The art table, that is. While I am wary of people guarding the borders of artistic genre, I am less worried about delineating between what is and isn’t art. If you accept that performance poetry is indeed an artform, then what does it matter what it is called or where its boundaries are? All artists are just affixing various tools (paper, microphone, paintbrush, camera, sandwich making materials, etc…) to their noncorporeal hearts and are trying to shoot them at their audiences.5 If any of those tools never existed, would the artists who would have used them not be making art? Does one just have the right genes to use a DSLR camera and only the lucky ones born after the invention of the DSLR camera get to express those genes? Methinks not!
Alternatively, this is why I don’t believe AI can make “art.” Or an advertisement cannot be art. And it doesn’t matter how beautiful or complex they are.6
Here, watch this video from The Tonight Show in 1981 of Jimmy Stewart reading a poem he wrote for his dog, Beau.
Were I Jimmy Stewart’s poetry teacher, a version of me might hear the beginning of this poem and stop him and say, “Mr. Stewart, please consider ditching the rhyme scheme and also this earnest tone.” What a horrible person I would be! This is a performance poem, to me, and while it matters a lot that it’s being read by one of the most celebrated actors of all time, it matters much more that he is not acting here. He is, as far as I can tell, being himself, a human, communicating the heartbreaking beauty of the love (does he ever say the word love?) the love that he, and by extension we, can have for a dog, and by extension any creature.
Don’t call it poetry or performance poetry if you like. I don’t care. But this does what I search for in any artistic experience, so I am going to call it art and you can’t stop me!
Or watch Peter Cook’s work (or any ASL poet) and tell me that that’s not poetry.
It has a script, but that’s not the poem. ASL poetry is the easiest case I can think of for convincing people that performance poetry is a real, mostly distinct genre and, were he alive, I would like to hear Dean Young’s response to that. I would also like to hear his new poems.
Live Reading vs. Performance
One day I will do a deep dive into the origins of the “poetry voice” of literary readings. Some of my very favorite poets, whose real and artistic voices are wildly different from each other, all adopt this same pace and intonation when reading their work live. It’s like the accent from New Pagepoetrysylvania. But it calls attention to the fact that authors reading their work have no natural impetus to deliver their poems in an entertaining7 way. And truly, writing and performing are different skill sets. No one is asking the page poets to become good performers (although I would seriously love it if they hired actors (or me!) to do their readings).
However, a page poem can be performed amazingly by its author, or someone else. When someone else is reading it, you get the added bonus of seeing their individual interpretation (as well as their performance choices, like gesture and pace and blocking and props and lighting and makeup and animus and zhwa de veeve and breath). Similarly a performance poem can be read and bring great pleasure to the reader (people can, and have, read stage plays for fun!).
A poetry reading (not performance) is set up to fail a little since you are asking a live audience to imagine what a poem looks like on the vessel it was composed on AND THEN figure out the path back to the heart/meaning/idea of the poet. Performance poetry attempts to cut out the middle man of imagined written language and get right to the heart/meaning/idea of the matter (although any children’s librarian can tell you that you can’t just read the words deadpan from the book or you will surely have an audience revolt on your hands).
Why does it matter at all that performance poetry be defined and differentiated from page poetry? Well certainly performance poetry has had to fight for legitimacy from the vanilla crowd. But also when you can put a little conceptual space between the two, you can free the performers to really try some wild shit live and you free the pagers from feeling like they have to be entertaining when doing a reading.
I have more thoughts and examples on this topic (don’t worry!) but I gotta get to this book reading I’m doing.
The next one is this Saturday in Evanston. Which is like right now!
Oh, apparently one of Mumford’s sons is actually building music venues around London. INTERESTING.
Also—like the hip hop detractors—considering the abundance of people of color at the forefront of performance poetry, this “it’s not poetry” business is also a mechanism of dumb old white supremacy. But that is a different essay.
In BED.
“He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.” -Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
This assertion becomes muddier when you consider the kinds of things art is attempting to sell that isn’t, say, fancy soap or scented garbage bags. Art is often trying to sell itself and the artist and that makes the whole practice more difficult under capitalism. And even without money, we are still trying to sell our coolness, to have our feelings “purchased” by the affection and attention of patrons. Maybe art can’t fully be assessed until after the artist has died and capitalism overthrown? I’m working on both.
I define “entertaining” here as considering the enjoyment and experience of the live audience when preparing a presentation.