POETRY IN PERFORMANCE

...For example, all poets were requested to limit their readings to ten minutes...

...As it is evident that physical presence can alter the reception of poetry, it is also true that poetry readings give the listener a fairly generalized impres- sion of any poem read, especially if the poem is a lengthy one...

...This movement is the poem's internal performance, the way in which a poem gets to where it ends...

...They have different poetry...

...Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, our two most listened-to poets, have long been saying what we wanted to hear from the start, not that their stances invalidate their work though, many poets have admitted that they will read a certain poem they no longer believe in mainly because the response has been so positive...

...Other poets simply ran over the time limit, causing a back-up of poets later in the afternoon...

...Even those most leery of poetry may embrace it when they understand that prayers, chants, even war songs and rote learning are part of the living poetic tradition...

...The children set the spirit for poetry to sound and resound in at atmosphere of receptivity, not to poetry's "literary implications," as some students and teachers call it, but to poetry's gracious audacity, the way it can be fine and silly...

...Thus, poetry's pleasures are not only in its sober meanings or multiple truths, but in the delight of the sheer movement or functioning of language...

...These events, which are held annually, may well serve as models or prototypes that exhibit the pleasures and pitfalls of poetry in performance...

...Oral performance may inspire reading poetry, with an ear attuned to the music that is the internal voice of the poem...

...Actually, as soon as there is any kind of relationship with an audience, the poem is performing its own life...

...In a poem about poetry, Robert Duncan says the "design" issues "without a plan,/ complete/ in the all over thing heard;/ a hidden thing/ revealed in its pulse and/ duration;/ a fire...

...their activity had a political manifestation in that they were aiming at the common folk in a common idiom, with language closer to the rhythms and patterns of colloquial speech...

...Most waited their turn to read patiently, and listened attentively to their colleagues, but I was surprised at the large number who didn't wait or listen, and were only eager to do their thing...

...With poetry performances still existing in a twilight zone between the ritual of poetry and the entertainment of visual as well as oral performance, it is marvelous to see how the reading of poetry can reach people and give them pleasure, and then, maybe, generate a fresh view of poetry on the page...

...Yet, the poem eventually veers outwards, standing naked as a public document...

...At least one poet wondered how he could possibly communicate his poetic range, or even allow the audience to get into his poetry at all, in such a short time...

...Poetry out loud, on a large stage, has the potential to activate sensibility and to unify people of widely differing tastes and developments...

...The poetry readings of the past two decades have now snowballed into numerous poetry festivals and workshops...

...When hearing poetry, on the other hand, one catches at themes and ideas or at least senses a tone that provides a clue to meaning...

...Aside from this disturbing need for a "personality" to act as a drawing card, a festival that hopes to attract many listeners and readers has other interesting sore spots...

...Whether Greek, African, Hebrew, or Christian, the recitation of poetry is an integral part of service or ritual...

...These comprise the subversive character of poetry the metaphor that strikes close to home, the imaginative power that goes beyond or undermines received notions...

...Poetry can provide the fresh slant on society, the double or triple perspective offered through its ironies, paradoxes and ambiguities...

...Poetry moves not so much toward a fixed point but- within itself from points or perspectives that seem to arrange themselves as if in an improvisation...

...As one child commented, "Well, all the poetry was fine but I liked most my friend Nellie...

...Of course, this is fine, unless it inspires the poet to work only within a range that will prefigure an affirming response...

...He said he thought the right time had not yet come to us as a society for experiencing this special relationship between poets and audiences, except perhaps for black poets and their audiences...

...Students, too, noticed the inconsiderateness of some professional poets, who only listened briefly, marched out in the middle of poems and held conversations with one another, sometimes practically under the very nose of the distracted reader on the podium...

...Thus the reader is often on the alert for something to hold on to, and more often than not it is some issue already publicly exposed...

...By the '70s song writers-singers such as Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were also considered poets, and poetry, though in forms necessarily shaped by the special requirements of the popular song, became visible to a larger audience than even Allen Ginsberg could be responsible for...

...There may be another reason, par- ticularly endemic to large poetry readings, that causes poets to sound alike to listeners...

...This was a disappointment for the high school and college students, to whom Ginsberg, possibly more than any other American poet, epitomizes the excitement poetry readings are capable of achieving...

...only to end on the willful exclamation, paradoxical and rich with what can best be called poetic insight: But good times and bad times are both wonderful...

...The apparently spontaneous follow-up on some aspect or quality is inherent in the previous line or image...

...This is the communicative ideal for all larger and fully integrated readings...

...The readers include elementary school children, winners of a city-wide high school poetry contest, college and graduate students, poets from the staff of the college, and a variety of guest and "featured" poets...

...Luckily, David Ignatow, a poet of definite wit, music and gentle warmth, agreed to fill the space...

...As Archibald MacLeish implied years ago, the reading of such a poem feels like something's happened rather than something's "meant...

...When reading they translate their creations into communication, and in doing so begin to realize how their thought works in public...

...This observation reflects the difficulty of evaluating poetry at readings...

...barry wallenstein, whose work has ap-peared in American Poetry Review, Contemporary Literature and other journals, teaches in the English Department at the City University of New York...

...Ignatow's poetry is as able to provide surprises as Ginsberg's, but the celebrity's entertainment value, a key element of performance, was missed by many people...

...III The Poetry Festivals at New York's City College, which since its inception has been the people's college, are planned to expose poetry as a performing art...

...In 1975, the featured poet was to be Allen Ginsberg, but he was ill and could not attend...

...This is its performance and entertainment value...

...II One way to look at poetry is as a language performance, a dance of words...

...These poets were not merely reading literature aloud in a conscious effort to recover an oral poetry...

...Many high school poets and college poets, to say nothing of the pros, already possess a "writing style...

...The possible ways in which oral performance relates to the internal dynamics are the ultimate coherence between the two . distinct yet related ways to view poetry in performance on the page and on the stage...

...If you say it in poetry, it's true, no matter how many laws of logic and plausibility you violate...

...POETRY IN PERFORMANCE BARRY WALLENSTEIN Echoes of tribal ritual and religious rites Much has been said over the past ten years or so about the resurgence of oral poetry, which flourished in a more or less organized way around the mid 1950s in New York and San Francisco...

...This improvisatory capacity of poetry allows it to function so perfectly in oral performance, as the poet's living voice gives interpretive power to his frequently elusive voice on the page...

...Some were fine and silly...

...And this bettered poetry's likelihood of winning a live audience...

...The pleasures of a poetry reading are separate from those of reading poetry...

...The act of reading assists in allowing one to suspend disbelief and acknowledge the world of the poem as the true and operative one...

...The intention is to attract a large and diverse audience for poetry and as representative a group of readers as is possible in a whole day devoted to poetry...

...I like to regard the poem as a dance of words that play out or extend an action, and it is that performance which counts finally more than what the poem is intellectually presenting...

...A fourth grader began a poem conventionally enough: Bad times are when you have to wake up early in the morning for school...

...Oral performances are the aggressively democratic side of contemporary poetry, which in the recent past had become esoteric to the extreme with Yeats, Eliot and Pound, and quite difficult for many readers...

...The effectiveness of oral poetry has origins in tribal ritual and other religious rites...

...Poetry in some respects is language turned inward the writing out of the most private sense of how words approximate feelings...

...The oral performance only classifies the fundamental character of this most ancient and modern art...

...During a panel discussion following a poetry festival at the City College of New York, in Spring, 1974, one member of the audience spoke up about the excitement of listening to poetry readings in Russia during the 1930s...

...Contemporary poets who make verbal contact with large audiences" free poetry from the traditional, formal contexts of the classroom and the printed page...

...Obviously, the poet will get across best if he or she hits upon the correct or popular attitude of the moment...

...Reading styles are in- fectious and, in addition, much of modern poetry tends to be declarative...

...The pace at which it goes by prevents any close consideration of the actual dynamics of the poem as an integrated, intellectualized structure...

...Others were funny too...

...The movement on the page, the way lines release other line, the way an emotion or emotions leap along these releases, the way ideas move along stanza breaks and ellipses, is the real performance of poetry...

...When people say "that poem works" they probably mean it performs well...

...Nevertheless, the phenomenon of readings shows that all poetry can figure into this social awakening, for the mere fact of poetry's performance has a built-in political corrective...

...Such performances of oral poetry show it to exist not as a rarefied art, but as an art central to and expressive of primary human motives...

...Poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats were a part of this development...

...This dance of words cuts across the theme or idea of the poem, and, at best, enlarges or intensifies our experience with the poem, very much as a movement in a dance performance intensifies and gives expression to the idea in the mind of the choreographer...

...One can almost envision poets attracting gatherings of working people as well as students, as Mayakovsky did in Russia, Neruda in Chile, and Guillen in Cuba...

...Here the political burden of the poet is most apparent...

...No doubt the audience that listens doesn't always read poems, but there is the chance that what is alive to the ear will be so on the page...

...We all have expectations based on physical presence, so that we "hear" women poets, Black poets, working-class poets, poets over a certain age, according to preconceptions that have little to do with the art being performed...

...The poetry read by the professional poets was as varied as the audience, yet to many this poetry sounded alike, except perhaps for the Black poets who sounded different from the whites...

...With the poet's own voice, especially before an audience, we get a dramatization or extension of the dynamics of the poem on the page...

...Fourth, fifth and sixth graders were the first readers of the day, and indeed, are among the best readers, for they most easily and naturally carry language to public life...

...The dynamics, or dramatic value of the voice, do the communicating...

...It is well known that poetry in the past and in many places in the world today contains elements and ideas that are ideologically explosive...

...At the deepest level, poetry has the power to release people from themselves and bring them into relationship with other emotional and ideological universes...

...However, the virtues of such an undertaking were also evident...

...This is the dramatic element that true poetry contains, and that draws an audience of listeners and readers...

...In their poetry, as in the work of some of the older poets, the genuine voice gives credence to any poetic utterance...