Performance Poetry

[poliphilo]

I write book reviews. It's a painful business. I don't like hurting people, but how can I avoid it when so much of what passes under my nose is so dreadfully bad?

The book I reviewed yesterday, for example- a book of performance poetry: it should never have been published. Performance poetry is a branch of stand-up. Take it off the stage and it's like a fish on a slab, all the wiggle gone out of it. Would you put Frankie Howerd's monologues in a book? Well, would you? I jolly well hope not.

I'm trying not to be scornful, but as a print poet, one who writes for the page, it niggles me that you can make a reputation on the back of such limp stuff. I understand that performance poetry can't be complex, that it has to be fully comprehensible at a first hearing, but, even so, I'm surprised at the low-level of verbal invention, the banality, the lack of technique.

But I guess it's the way they tell them.

Which reminds me, Cyril Fletcher died a couple of days back. They didn't call 'em performance poets in his day, but that's essentially what he was. British readers may remember him as the chap who sat in an armchair and recited "odd odes" on Esther Rantzen's TV show. The odd odes were pretty naff- coarser, clumsier versions of Hillaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales- but Cyril's delivery just about made them work. He had a slight squint and a plummy voice and he wore a velvet smoking jacket (green I think it was.) He was quite old even then and the rest of the cast treated him as a beloved great uncle- a link to an earlier era of entertainment.

Dare I say I didn't like him? Yes I dare. I squirmed at the way he caricatured my profession. Green velvet smoking jacket indeed!

At least these days we no longer think of poets as effete wimps. And I'll concede that we've got the performance people to thank. Today a poet is a person with a cigarette (or spliff) in one hand and a pint in the other who holds forth to raucous audiences in pubs. The verse in the book I reviewed isn't literature, but it's chippy and sparky and it deals with topics of real interest, like race and politics and war. It's my (getting to be hackneyed) complaint about print poetry that so much of it is so dully middle-class- all about my lovely garden and the churches I visited in Spain last summer. Performance poets would have things thrown at them if they served up that tepid, suburban stuff.

Which brings things full circle, I guess- because that's how poetry got started. The first poets were popular entertainers who went from town to town with epics in their heads. Have harp, will travel. Homer was a Performance poet.

So, OK guys, you've got the cred back. Now how about learning some craft?

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Isn't that puzzling, your father suddenly outcropping a yearning for a poem, and it's about the lands where the Jumblies live! Actually, I think it's wonderful!

And then asking for a race-horse poem to be read at his funeral.

One never knows when the need for a poem will surface.

My father would let us small children bounce on his knee while he recited a French poem about a galloping horse in a terrible Texas accent. He bounced faster and faster until we fell off laughing.

And you've also helped me suddenly remember these moments with my dad:

He could make little white mice out of his handkerchiefs, and he would make them appear to move in his palm.

And he'd patiently draw pictures to go with each alphabet letter--I remember sitting in his lap and learning A and seeing a crayoned red apple.

Another memory of my father breaks through: toward the end of his life, my sister and I could sing the Pie Jesu duet for him from Weber's Requiem, and he'd cry every time. We can't sing it anymore, or we'll cry ourselves, remembering him.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My father wasn't very present during my childhood. Just one or two things stand out.

I remember a dream he told me. It was about how he was being chased through swamps and when the pursuers caught him they crucified him. I wonder now if this was a past life memory.

And (free-associating) I remember a dream of my grandfather's. It involved a bandit chieftain called She Bluebell. I thought that was a wonderful name and promptly took it up into my own personal mythology.

That dream must be getting on for a hundred years old. Freud could have analysed it....

I would draw pictures of She Bluebell. He looked a lot like Popeye's Bluto. He had lots of very big teeth and a fringe of beard and a hook in place of a hand.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Wonderful dreams, very visual and unusual.

Being pursued is common enough in dreams, but being crucified isn't, I don't think. I wonder why a crucifixion? Which is not just a murder, but a ritual murder...fascinating.

And "She Bluebell," the bandit chieftain! Did he describe any of the plot for you?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't think there was ever much of a story conected to She Bluebell; the memorable thing was always the name.

My father told us the crucifixion dream over tea one evening. He made a big thing of the nails being driven home. My mother tried to hush him up, thinking it would upset us. (It didn't.)

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

My father is still, thankfully, here on earth. He wasn't very present during my childhood either, but for reasons that are if not acceptable, at least forgivable. One of the things I remember from when I was younger was him singing in the car on the long drive to my grandparents' houses. And I remember him taking out the knife he always kept in his pocket (and still does) and removing 'slivers'. It never hurt when he did it.

Gee, thanks for helping me remember that!