From the Archives: The Words

Performance and Literariness in Poetry

The ending of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

I’m still recovering (though recovering I am) from a vicious cold that left me almost ;) incapable of posting Notes but definitely beyond extended composition. I also still await the video of Projecting L.A. 2024 I plan to share, so I offer another selection out from behind the paywalled archives. Next week and that after I’ll be traveling for leisure — Ohio for a college graduation and to visit family, then New York, where, among other pleasures, I’ll be dining with a gathering of Substackers, so what I share may be inventive.

For today, it occurs to me that recent work here on Homo Vitruvius has been essay heavy and, with one exception, short on my poetry. Here, then, from last June, an essay on poetry combined with an important poem from my collection Waiting for Word. You might take it as a declaration of mission.

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I had the pleasure back in April of listening to poet Brendan Constantine deliver his featured presentation as part of the Village Poets monthly reading series in Sunland-Tujunga, California, north of downtown Lo Angeles. (I’ll be a featured reader in August.) Brendan is not only an inventively talented poet but a compelling performer of his poetry as well. He got me thinking, as I often do, about the differences between performance and literariness in poetry. That isn’t actually an accurate observation in relation particularly to Brendan, because among his impressive skills is how he combines both those qualities. The son of actors – Michael Constantine was his father – Brendan is a compelling performer of his work. As a performer, too, he is different from so many performance poets, who offer, repetitively, the same cliched tone of emotional urgency and rap-influenced beats.

Brendan’s performance style is all his own, and it reached a peak in his closing selection, “The Opposites Game,” a delightfully surprising and ultimately moving poem he constructed out of a lesson pursued for his middle school students with a line from Emily Dickinson: “My life had stood a loaded gun.” (What a dynamic teacher he must be! What an experience for those students.) There are a number of videos of the poem online, including a TED-Ed animation and this live-recorded but seated offering, and they are all excellent but lack, for me, the crucial added elements of Brendan’s vivid physicality in extracting the poem from the ether and then ushering its lines into the air toward his listeners.

The performance/literary dichotomy is often used (including by me) as a signal of evaluation placing the literary above the performed. Orality preceded literacy, of course, and thousands of years ago, poetry began in orality, in performance. Different traditions evolved, separating what remained song from what transferred to the printed page. In recent decades, super-charged by rap, oral – performance – poetry (“spoken word”) experienced a rebirth. Much of it descended into the kind of cliché I reference above, just as much literary poetry is also trapped in cliché. In the literary it may appear as antiquated and tired rhyming or more contemporary diffusions of ethereally obscure sentiment. In performance, it is often new-style self-righteous political outrage and those rap-rhythms. There isn’t anything especially notable about this. Writing poetry may look easy: it’s short and – apparently, in contemporary times – without disciplined form. But writing good poetry, as always, is hard.

Writing good poetry that is both literary and performative is its own kind of hard. Part of that is dependent on the performer – her personal performing talent, which is distinct from the performative nature of the poem. Brendan has it all, as does Amanda Gorman, differently, as it should be. Part of what made her inaugural poem for President Biden, “The Hill We Climb,” such an enormous success (there were multiple elements of that success) and what raised it above the dullness of every prior inaugural reading, was Gorman’s rare, effective blending of literariness and currently recognizable performance poetry. It can take an actor of exquisite talent, such as Fiona Shaw, performing the entirety of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” – the epitome of the difficult, obscure literary poem – to reveal what a phantasmagoria of performance it enables, invites, inherently delivers. It is a poem of voices, dialogues, pronouncements, personas, across centuries, social classes and climes, and Shaw inhabits and performs them all, shifting among them in the instant by performative magic. Prepare to be wowed.

For myself, I write for the page. High school drama club president and lead actor that I was notwithstanding, I am not a performer, though I can get in the spirit. I don’t have the talent, and certainly with regard to poetry, I never desired to be. I purposefully write for the page. It is the topography of typography married to music that besotted me with poetry as a youth. But if it isn’t always performed, all poetry is read, and when read aloud it is very often read badly and dully. Some people actually seem to believe it to be in the nature of poetry reading that it strive for the soporifically dull.

There was a voice all over the internet at one time (thankfully, less so now) that recorded under the name of Tom O’Bedlam, the title of a great anonymous English poem of the early Seventeenth Century. One can find people on the internet who opine with gratitude for his readings. (One can find anything on the internet, even the truth.) I can only speculate that they, like the mortician O’Bedlam himself, were influenced by old recordings of Yeats and Eliot and the like, with their death-bed cadences, into believing that serious poetry needs to sound really, really grave, as if already laid into the sarcophagus for entombment. My practical goal when doing public readings is only to reach, realistically, for the unattainable goal of reading like Brendan and avoid, at the cost of my reputation, sounding anything reminiscent of O’Bedlam. I try to read expressively, and with an actor’s attention to phrase and accent as added deliverers of meaning, and with consideration for audience pleasure and comprehension. I’m told that I do. I trust I’m not being lied to in kindness.

Photo by Julia Dean

A further challenge for me at a public reading is the selection of poems. (Too many readers fail to take up this challenge.) Since I write for the page, some of my poems – aside from other possible reasons, such as the density of figurative expression and the compression of syntax and ideas – present too great a challenge for me to render comprehensibly or effectively read aloud. (For Fiona Shaw – no problem.) I wrote the poems to be read and seen, not solely heard, so I do not read them publicly. An example, from early in my poetry collection Waiting for Word, is “The Words.” It is written in two streams of interweaving triplets and parenthetical couplets. The first offers the primary narrative ruminations of the poem. The second is a counterpoint commentary that offers, until the two streams converge late in the poem, continuous wordplay on a host of idioms employing the word word, for example, “mark my word.” If memory serves (it may not – I think I’ve tried to banish it) I did once try to read this poem publicly and, to my mind, failed terribly. I simply could not orally convey what was going on. It may be possible with much practice and failure, but why submit audiences to that? I intended the poem to be read on the page.

AJA

Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

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“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”