Performance & Poetry

I'm a bit thin on the content just now…

I've been meaning to settle down with Laclau for a few days, and I have a serious academic need to do so. But my time is taken up writing for, reading within and collaborating on a series of poetics essays which will be included in the APG anthology that is currently in the works. 

Today my task is to think the role of performance within the group's history. I am aided by having text written about this topic by various poets in the group, but assembling these into an essay still imposes many challenges - interpretive, aesthetic, etc…

I will share this one small portion of my draft (it will be vetted by the group and may change significantly) concerning the established history of performance in relation to poetry.

• Always Historicize!   It isn’t that we didn’t know some history about this, some of us did. We knew that poetry was once very verbal (Greeks, Troubadours, pre-columbian Americans, many African cultures, etc); but within the euro-culture that we still to some extent live & work within (and within many other urban cultures across the world) poetry had been reduced to a "page" phenomenon centuries or millennia ago. Perhaps bardolotry goes too far;  but it’s true that Shakespeare and his contemporaries did remarkable poetry, intending it for stage performance. But theater, like narrative, turns away from (not just verse) but poetry itself, during the 18th century—at least in European culture and its outposts. Maybe it is due to Parry & Lord’s influence that the history of performed poetry lays such heavy stress on memorization. Whatever the case, that isn’t something we wanted to explore. Memorization is not the whole story of course and there are both exceptions to that conception (more of oral poetries than performed poetry) as well as occasional revivals of orality and performance in relation to poetry as with slam and rap and what gets called ‘performance poetry’ more generally in our time. But again the frequent memorization (though there is freestyle rap and much else) as well as the preponderance of heavily cadenced rhyme and relatively traditional verse structures underlying most of those contemporary manifestations didn’t offer much to suit our poetic desires. The Beat approach with a poet reading with sax or bongos, while not unappealing as an idea, faltered often on the poetry itself which, paradoxically, unlike that of Stein or Pound somehow, seemed very remote from our moment (a beat poet circa the year 2000 reminds us of that moment in the Woodstock movie when Sha-Na-Na take the stage). And while there were those doing performance in interesting ways among the Language folks (and still are), Grenier’s famous “I HATE SPEECH” and other poetic operating principles in that loose collection of poets effectively bracketed speech-based performance as a central generative focus (as much as we like a lot of LangPo very much, it is nearly as page-bound on whole as the more traditional verse it posed an alternative to). The history that meant the most to us performatively speaking was scattered and somewhat singular, DADA, Mac Low, Antin, Cage and a few others being the most pertinent but still providing only suggestive examples, and significantly, ones that often we could only read about (The Four Horsemen providing a notable counter-example much closer to some of our impulses). 
• Our sense of poetry history demands a retelling, one that sees the centrality of performance as sometimes more and other times less prominent, but never absent. Performance is crucial to poetry -- we know and feel this every Wednesday. Orality and performance are not simply something poets did back before they could shuck off that burden by writing their poems down. Performance has to be seen as one key dimension of poetry’s growth and reconfiguration of itself, its audience and its world. The reduction of poetry to “the page” diminishes it and stifles that growth. Poetry can be great on the page, this is indisputable. It’s just that that’s not all it is, or all it should be. And as we’ve discovered, that which cannot be done on the page can sometimes be done on the stage.