The performance poem is a myth; or, rather, the poem on the page is a performance. So in teaching Poetry Performance, the obvious starting point is poetry that is impossible to perform: Ashbery, say. Just as Dada and Futurists wrote unproducible plays which they then performed (Tzara’s “Gas Heart,” Artaud’s “Jet of Blood”, Mayakovsky’s “Mayakovsky, A Tragedy”) -- these make for great, student-directed and designed class productions. One of my favorites here is Notley’s The Descent of Alette. The marching quotation marks are a performance in themselves, and of course indicate that the visually impenetrable text is, in fact, spoken. I had a student last year, Emily Liechty, who performed one of the Descent pieces silently, using only her hands.

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Teach Olson’s “Projective Verse” and O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” back to back. Toss in some Surrealist and Futurist Manifestos. Then have the class invent schools of poetry, characters who write in that style, and write “their” poems.

Pessoa is great here. Physicalizing Pessoa’s heteronyms is a great performance. I had a student, Amanda Graham, who wrote a “Dating Game” play where she was the contestant and Pessoa’s heteronyms were her suitors. Pessoa personifies the performance of writing.

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Nathaniel Mackey provides a way into blending the performative (jazz) with the analytical -- engaging Griaule’s Ogotemelli and other delvings into Dogon cosmology opens up his Andoumboulou. The class collaborates with Thurman Barker’s jazz improv class, reading Whatsaid Serif to music. A student, Riel Paley, made a stop-action video of a Mackey piece using black and white Barbies and Kens.

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Discovering new poets is like writing a poem. d.a. levy reads like the original mimeo poet, the forever 21-year old revolutionary, the pure unknown selfless (or self-absorbed) artist, our Rimbaud. Mike Golden’s book, The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: The Art and Poetry of d. a. levy (Seven Stories Press: 1999), tells his story breathlessly and places levy acutely in the Beat/hippie lineage. Koon Woon, who published his first book, The Truth in Rented Rooms (Kaya: 1999) at the age of fifty, writes poems so heartbreakingly alive that students want to (and do) write him, thank him, send him presents. Engaging the poet directly is a great lesson in engaging the poem directly. Sapphire’s two books of poetry shatter predictability.

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Set up a field that starts with the origin of speech/language/text through books just published. Self-published chapbooks get across poetry’s utility.

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Rap is poetry. It’s one thing to say that rap’s lineage goes back to the keepers of the oral traditions in West Africa, the griots. It’s another to read Thomas A. Hale’s Griots and Griottes (Indiana: 1998). He’s got a list of griots in the US in Appendix A, and they’re super in class/performance. The Wassoulou griots of Mali have some great CD’s (The Divas from Mali (World Network), The Wassoulou Sound, Vol. 1 (Stern’s Africa). They are almost exclusively women.

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For poetry videos I like to use Moyers’ Language of Life and Fooling with Words and my own United States of Poetry. Heated debate! And a class with the painting students always ends up with arty, quick performances and people falling in love.

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“Exploding Text” is mostly simply acknowledging the poem in all states; every medium can be used as a means for communicating the language that makes the poem; the poem doesn’t stop with the book; performing is writing, too.

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Having made these points it’s time to unleash the sweat of poetry slam. Read Patricia Smith, Marc Smith, Willie Perdomo, Paul Beatty, Tracie Morris, Edwin Torres, Aloud, Poetry Nation, and Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. If you establish a slam team and start a league your students can letter in poetry and petition the Student Activities Board for a budget equal to the football team’s.

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A perfect final assignment for a Performance Poetry class is: Create a book of your poems, including cover and distribution. What a performance!

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--Bob Holman

(Bob Holman teaches Exploding Text: Poetry Performance at Bard College.)

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