My, What Sharp Ears You Have!, Part II

by Dana Luther

In Part I, which ran in the July issue, poet and professor Charles Bernstein, editor of Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, shared his perspective on the value of poetry and its public performance. This month, he expands on poetry's differences from other literary genres, and offers advice to performance poets.
DL: In your book's Introduction, you coined the term "animalady" to describe some of the indispensable qualities of poetry. Would you explain it?

CB: The "animalady" of poetry is the sensory, bodily dimension, the way in which language is exchanged in terms of the acoustic. The actual physical sound of the exchange is related to meaning. The meaning is not something that exists in an idealized way that doesn't have to do with the bodies that produce it and the bodies that hear it.

My "-malady" has to do with the fact that it's a kind of condition or limitation that we're inside. We can't get outside of it; we can't idealize language to imagine it has meanings that exist outside these physical boundaries. It's important to fully recognize the significance of the media that we use for poetry: the visual representation of the language and the acoustic sound of the language.

DL: You regard "the poetry reading as a public tuning." By this do you mean a sounding board for the continuous evolution of a work?

CB: Right. I meant that in one sense in a technical way. When you think about a poem existing in a primary way in a reading, in a performance, as opposed to on the page, then certain kinds of prosodic and rhythmic possibilities, timbre and intonation, present themselves which are not possible on the page. You can shift or keep constant how fast you read, vary the quality of your voice. So one way in which the work actually comes into tune so that people can hear these performative patterns is in the poetry reading. When people hear a poet read, they become attuned to the kinds of sounds the person is producing, which may not be apparent in the printed text of the poem.

Reading affords the poet the opportunity to "tune up" to hear how the work may sound, just as one imagines that musicians don’t just think about how something sounds, but have to try it out in public. There they can improvise to create the sound that they want. It’s a tuning both for the performer and for the reader.

And I also mean "tuning" to emphasize the improvisatory quality of poetry readings over and against the idea that a poem is a fixed, stable thing. You write the poem, and it becomes this absolutely immutable, static thing on a page. At a poetry performance nobody imagines it that way. Everybody reads their poems a little bit differently each time. The people who are present change the way you feel; or you hear in a different way depending on your mood, the physical space, and so on. So the mutability and improvisatory quality that underlie poetry performance could be thought of as tuning: trying things out, exploring and in this way creating.

So the process of tuning up becomes what the activity of poetry is. The activity of poetry is not just producing these objects on a page (though that’s part of the activity of poetry). It's also this tuning up in public before other people and with other people, which is a very different kind of exchange.

DL: Are "success" and judgment irrelevant in a living process that isn't goal oriented? What makes a "good" or "bad" reading?

CB: I think that there isn't a "right" way to read a poem, or a "better" or "worse" way to read a poem, any more than there's a "better" or "worse" way to write a poem. But the reading, the performance, is an extension of what the poem is, and vice-versa (the writing of the poem is an extension of what you're doing in the performance of it).

Different poems demand different kinds of vocalization. In respect to the quality of poetry, very often poets dislike actors reading poems, because they read them too well. It's hard to explain why that is, but it's a common dislike.

DL: What advice would you give poets who want to get involved in performance?

CB: It's not only important to give poetry readings but to organize poetry readings -- to imagine that organizing a poetry reading series is as important as editing a magazine, and to support that kind of activity where possible. Or to review poetry readings as well as poetry books. Or to review the way people read their work in the context of also reviewing their publications. Don't leave out the performance dimension when you imagine what the work of a poet is in critical contexts.

It's very important to take every opportunity you can to read your work out loud, to do performances of your work. Not just once in a blue moon, but as a frequent part of your work as a poet. Just as you might seek to publish poems in a number of magazines, or publish many books, it's also good to have many chances to read.

Then, consider the readings you do as being as significant as the publication of the work in print media. That means, for example, rehearsing your work. Make a tape of your reading, listen to it, and possibly "score" the page with different ideas you have as you listen. You could be faster here, slower here, and leave a pause here.

Also, listen to the tape of your reading in different situations. Not just where that's the only thing going on, but while you're washing the dishes or walking in the street, or exercising, or on the subway or a bus, so that you don't focus just on the poem from beginning to end, but hear it more as ambient sound. Once you can focus on the reading as ambient sound, pick up on dimensions of the performance that you wouldn't get if you were focused only on the main message of the poem.

DL: So it's important to approach performance as a process rather than getting into a single habit of reading?

CB: Right. Continue to rethink for each reading the way in which you read, and not to assume that the way you read once should be repeated. Don't go with the first thing or what seems the most obvious to you. Try out different styles, different rhythms and so on, and don't assume that you automatically know how to read every kind of poem. Try out performance dynamics that might seem contrary to what the poem would lend itself to, to try to provide some tension or contrast.

There's not a direct system for reading a poem that was written on the page. In a performance, you're adding things. So you have to come to the same kinds of decisions that you make in writing the poem itself. You may think that you don't need to make those decisions because you're relying on certain habitual patterns of how people read.

Then, throughout your life as a poet, keep re-rehearsing and rethinking what the performance is and what the possibilities for your work are. By performance, I don't mean highly theatrical, loud, demonstrative reading at all. When people come to poetry readings, they're not expecting to be at rock and roll concerts and can be put off by outrageous, over-the-top readings. So by "performance," I don't mean revving up. Often you can be more subtle.

I think one of the things you can realize when you listen to a tape and attend closely to how you read is that often the "chamber music" side of poetry is more intensely appealing than anything else. Often, being low-key has great value. You can read in a very introverted way and still have that work, if you intend it to be introverted. If your quietness is the result of nervousness and never thinking it through, it doesn’t come off that well. But if it's actually an intense thing that you're articulating -- having to do with the music of the work -- that can be just right.

DL: Can this also persuade an audience to attend more to the language?

CB: Yes, it may allow the audience to attend. Often poetry readings are a kind of sensory deprivation for people who are used to more theatrical kinds of performances. There's a sense of poetry reading as "poor theater." But a poor theater, low-tech performance is no less fully realized as a performance than a high-tech, multimedia performance. It's not something that is done because you can't do anything else; it's something that can be done because this is the sound you want to hear.

The more you rehearse and read, the more comfortable you are in the space of the poetry reading, the more you are able to play around, to improvise, and to understand that the reading's its own kind of space. While giving a reading you can have almost the experience of being at home writing in a notebook -- you're creating the sound as you go along. If you're not too self-conscious about the script, you can focus on the actual work of producing the sound.

Also, try listening to other people reading. Pay attention to the different styles of readings. Listen to tapes of historical poetry readings and readings that you would not be able to attend locally. Consider the possibilities, and become immersed in the performance of poetry as much as you are in the reading of poetry on the page.

Charles Bernstein's book Close Listening is available from amazon.com.

Other good poetry offerings are:
Electronic Poetry Center http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc
Major site devoted to contemporary innovative poetry, with significant archive of electronic magazines and books, author pages, and links to magazines, presses, and other poetry resources.

LINEbreak Poetry Radio: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak
Interviews and readings in RealAudio by poets and novelists, hosted and co-produced by Charles Bernstein, produced by Martin Spinelli.

Sound Links: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/sound/links.html
EPC's links to poetry performance on the web.

Ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/
Kenny Goldsmith's treasure trove of sound and visual poetry.

Interview on Visual Poetry with Close Listening contributor Johanna Drucker in Postmodern Culture:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.597/contents.597.html

Charles Bernstein's home page: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein
(Other contributors to Close Listening also have EPC home pages, including Marjorie Perloff, Nick Piombino, Susan Howe, and Dennis Tedlock.)

-- DL
(copyright 1998 Dana Luther)