Performance Poetry
Jan. 4th, 2005 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI 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?
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?
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 09:16 am (UTC)"Their heads are green, their hands are blue
and they went to sea in a sieve."
The first poem I ever remember hearing read aloud was "The Highwayman" - still one of my favorites (and read by my mother). I was encouraged to read poetry, there were books in my bedroom.
But you know, after I had to MEMORIZE *Old Ironsides* the charm wore off for awhile. I read a translation of Beowulf, because I thought I should, and ended up falling in love all over again. I'd love to hear it 'spoken'.
Performance poetry is dangerous. Strange things happen at Poetry slams, they aren't near as much fun as open mic nights.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 09:57 am (UTC)My favourite patriotic poem is Tennyson's Ballad of The Revenge. I committed whole chunks of it to memory when I was a boy.
At Flores in the Azores
Sir Richard Grenville lay
When a pinnace like a flutter'd bird
Came flying from far away,
"Spanish ships of war at sea;
We have sighted fifty-three..."
I know people who do Slam, but I don't think it would be my thing at all. I'm far too rare and delicate a bloom.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 10:54 am (UTC)He had to memorize it in high school.
An aside: He and his brother were both students at Lubbock High School in Lubbock, Texas. For some reason, his brother was called "Ham" and Dad was called "Eggs." Odd.
They both became architects, and both married art teachers.
Dad's brother died very young, leaving a little girl.
He slept on the wet ground while in WWII in Germany, and it is thought that contributed to his kidney failure.
...A little meandering down one family's memory lane, sorry...
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 11:18 am (UTC)Very beautiful.
I believe Tennyson wrote it very late in life.
I like hearing these little bits of family history.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 10:58 am (UTC)My mother and her sister were both art teachers.
My dad and his brother were both architects.
But Dad's brother didn't marry an art teacher. What was I thinking? He married a Texan named Dixie.
LJ comments can't be corrected.
I guess this is only important to little old me, but I don't like passing along an error like that. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 12:15 pm (UTC)long have they waved on high
And many an eye has danced to see
that banner in the sky
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon's roar;
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.
Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread,
Or know the conquered knee;
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
Oh, better that her shattered bulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!
*******************************************
It's about the USS Constitution. Written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Once I knew the story, it seems to me he wrote it in response to a story in the Boston paper that the government had decided to scrap the ship...and he didn't agree.
I had to read "Crossing the Bar" in one of my college English classes. It means more now than it did then...
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 12:22 pm (UTC)When I was a kid I owned a volume called Lyra Heroica, A Book of Verse for Boys- and it was full of things like that. I thought it was wonderful :)
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 11:00 am (UTC)Is it when the listeners tear into the poet and throw tomatoes and insults?
How awful.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 01:52 am (UTC)