This was written for a panel on performance poetry in a symposium organized by Mark McMorris, poet and creative writing professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. The panelists were asked to write a paper based on these questions:
PERFORMANCE MEDIA... The move away from the orthodoxy of the book and printed page -- towards what? Poetry in the age of Story Space and Disney. Orality, digital environments, body, image: a vigor, an expansion in the codes for legitimate expression? An investigation into codes? Other sites for poetry but with what cultural capacity, what interference into the general cultural static?
I. TOWARDS MEDIA-INFLUENCED ART
As poetry’s audience has grown and allowed itself to become more accepting of hearing a poem sung, rapped, or performed with a dancer, musician, laptop, or chorus -- as the audience expands what it listens to, while still calling it a poem, the poets expand how they say what they’re saying. As the performance of the poem has evolved, the poem itself has evolved. What is and isn’t a poem extends the poet’s reach.
In the last decade, poetry slams have opened the door for performance poetry to be considered its own category, certainly worthy of being written about and discussed in a poetry symposium. To be called a “performance poet” becomes a tag to place the work in context. We performers are the largest minority in the poetry world. At this very moment, as you read this, other poetry minorities are gathering at the borders, their own of course, looking for equality by arranging a literary coup against arranging -- or is that belonging -- or in the complexity of poetry’s beauty, the arrangement of belonging?
The Poet Poets branch out and infuse many worlds into their work. The Performance Poets branch out and infuse many disciplines into their work. But in this constantly new millennium the possibilities for media have grown way beyond Futurism and its logical conclusion -- the velvety dogma of glass machinery. With more toys to play with, it becomes easier for the eager PerfPo to hide behind the unorthodox -- at times diminishing the poem’s purpose, diluting its impact with over-information. Before the poet has fully developed the communication we’re lost in a sea of distraction and cultural static... or are these the tangents of the poem brought to life?
Theater is where technique becomes magic, transporting us to the poem’s next life. The many disciplines at our disposal become an extension of the poem, so that if the text of the performance isn’t worked out, the visual or the sound of the performance is. This is like the idea of a poem not meshing with its language or form, i.e., a poem presented before its time. The performance poem, recognizing its limits, does a strip tease to metaphor so that we as an audience see its genesis and become more forgiving to the poet who chooses to combine disciplines in a search for a richer experience.
Or else, the poem takes an elaborate graphic treatment on the page, echoing its live dynamic onstage with inventive typography onpage -- so while it may not be the best written poem, it still uses space and shape to evoke the content or emotion in performance -- which means the poem needs to be heard rather than read. This is the experiential AS poem. The definition of what’s supposed to be the poem becomes the poem. The music, sound, actions onstage are all part of the poem, performing an evolution within the audience’s reception -- equating a subtle turn of lyrical phrasing into a delicate lighting change. The stage is the sheet of paper, the poem is each theatrical element -- a physical manifestation of the poem’s language, brought to life.
