Performance Poetry

So, poetry slams bother me. Poetry jams bother me (and yes, Agent Utah, you bother me!). The term “spoken word” bothers me in its pretense of mixing the elevated and the mundane, when it's mostly just mundane (mostly really really mundane). And yes, “performance poetry” also bothers me. Recently, I clicked on my borders rewards link to see their weekly top ten or whatever it is. And in the corner is a link to a video with a length introduction, including a montage of poets and “performance poets” reading their work, ranging from the lofty to the colloquial. This invariably contrasts high and low, usually with a late middle aged white man peering out over his glasses, standing at a microphone, reading in a low voice, pausing for dramatic effect every now and then – even academics aren’t above a little showmanship. And the other kind is usually a ragged looking individual speaking in pseudo-rap without the background beat, either a bald headed white male pointing at his mouth with two fingers, saying “this right here, y’all, this is my church” or else an angry sounding man in dreadlocks on top of a tenement building or against a wall of graffiti somewhere in New York or Chicago or some other gritty urban center. Now, call me a snob, I sure like a good cup of coffee, so why not? But is this poetry? Is this what it should be? What it has become? Ostensibly, I might be the target audience of this small reel of film (and I am, on occasion, genuinely sucked in to the odd Billy Collins promotion - speaking of a self on display). I am an English major, I have some interest in poetry, even as I go in and out of understanding it, feeling connected to language and a life of the mind, and I have even published a few poems, not enough to call myself “a poet” but enough to declare more than a passing interest in the medium. There is something about the performance element in this montage that rubs me wrong. I have been hard pressed to articulate it, but today it dawned on me. The reel itself declares poetry insufficient. Performance poetry implies the insufficiency of the medium, and seems to suggest, along with so much else in our hyper-image-conscious, celebrity infatuated culture, that words on printed page are not enough. The alchemy of reading and the activated imagination is not enough. No. Like an Eminem concert, we need to watch the “real poet” perform his work. Now, I realize this is to some extent human nature and attending a poetry reading – of serious poetry, that is, cannot be considered a kind of cardinal sin. But elevating words arranged in a rhythmic fashion, and throwing in some figurative language of personal or collective hardship cannot, in and of itself, be considered poetry, much less when the primary intent seems to put a self on display, for which there are so many other forums in our culture. There is, of course, an American non-conformist streak that snubs tradition, that refuses the imposition of categories of high culture, that is egalitarian. I am in sympathy with such views, even if they would seem to run counter to my basic premise here. What is missed in such arguments that elevate the inane, that beatify the banal, is an understanding of the nature of poetry. It is an elusive thing, to be sure, but present, nonetheless. At its best, poetry is a consciousness in full bloom. Good poetry, at the very least, is consciousness striving toward blossom, it widens, or perhaps better, deepens consciousness, awareness, wisdom. It expands the soul. To expand, the soul requires solitude, silence, deep encounter, not the socioeconomic grumblings of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five without a DJ, although this, too, certainly has its place. But filming it, packaging it, and marketing it under the rubric of “poetry” misses the point of poetry, what Li-Young Lee calls being “soul awake.” There's a reason more poetry is written (or perhaps "performed") than read these days. Soon it may be the same with the novel. Most of us feel somehow special (could it be the inundation of hero myths in our culture? do we all feel we either are, or should aspire toward, the heroic?) and that we have some special nugget of wisdom to share, simply by knowing we are a beautiful and unique snowflake, or rather, that our experiences are unique and ours alone. That uniqueness in and of itself, we feel, ought to be put on display, and maybe, just maybe, we can be given a slice, however small, of that golden pie: celebrity. Few however, and I include myself here, are willing or able to do deep soul work, the kind necessary for poetry, for creating a space for poetry to flourish internally before it can be expressed externally, skillfully. Call it a personal quirk, but to me, turning down the speakers, shutting off the monitor, and yes, shutting down the poet’s performance is the only way to make space for poetry to live, to breathe, and to do its work.