Performers: The Auctioneer

Sean Matthews "People Smoking Out my Window":



Among pixel, page and stage poets, the one that sticks closest to stereotype may be the last, especially the slammer. It is a young (i.e. fewer than 5% that I've seen were over 40) man's (i.e. more than two thirds of those I've encountered were male) world of cliché, platitude wannabes, constant shrieking, narcissism, and self-promotion. It is the mirror image of Tim Murphy: slammers generally make good eye contact and [over]use gesture and facial expression but don't modulate their tempo, tone or volume any more than John Marcus Powell does. Almost without exception, they speak so fast their words blur; combined with their excessive enthusiasm, they seem like overeager salesmen or auctioneers.

Eric Darby's "Scratch & Dent Dreams" from the 2005 National Poetry Slam Individual Semifinals:



Is it poetry? Not by any useful definition. It seems memorable enough for the orator but not for those who count: the attendees. In the slam world, the ultimate compliment a viewer can render is requesting to see the words. Such flattery rarely occurs. Even the national championships don't draw more viewers than participants. In all my research I have never seen a slam offering being presented or quoted by anyone other than the author. Rhetoric with rhyme (if present) could be a more apt description; other aspects of technique are conspicuously absent. The presentations and comments feature passion and message (neither of which vary much from one performance to the next), making most slammers a fatal combination of sentimentalist and Content Regent.

"We Are More" by Shane Koyczan for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics:



On the plus side, it would be impossible to create a composite "perfect poet" without the slammer's assertiveness in public.

Performers: The Cylon

Please take a break to view Tim Murphy's recital at the 2004 National Book Festival. If your computer won't play the video just click on "Launch in a new window" and wait a few seconds.

"Wait a minute," you wonder, "what is this guy doing in this discussion? Tim Murphy is one of the best poetry presenters on the planet! He is that rare poet who has mastered the craft and respects the art form and audience enough to memorize his work."

True, there aren't many presenters in Tim Murphy's class. I'll leave it to you to decide whether this says more about the state of the art than this particular artist, though. In any event, Mr. Murphy exhibits two of the three characteristics of the Cylon poet:

1. Lack of eye contact.
   
   Tim's eyes flit back and forth across the room like a Cylon raider or centurion from "Battlestar Galactica". He speaks over the audience, not to it.



2. Lack of gesture, movement or facial expression.
   
   Note the complete lack of mobility in Tim's arms as he speaks. In short, Tim recites rather than performs poetry. To his credit, he doesn't look up and to his right, as amateurs do when they're trying to remember their lines.



3. Monotone.
   
   Mr. Murphy modulates his tone rather well, although he occasionally hammers on accented syllables--a common error among metrists. This overemphasizes the rhythm just as John Marcus Powell's ham-fisted, random overstressing underscores the lack of it.
   
   Graft the voice of Tom o' Bedlam onto Tim Murphy, add a smidgeon of computerized echo effect, and you would have the perfect Cylon poet.

Performers: The Tortoise and the Brulber

The Tortoise

A British actor who goes by the pseudonyms "Spoken Verse" and "Tom o' Bedlam" is well known by YouTubers for two reasons:

1. He successfully fought YouTube to have his slide show rendition of Michael Ondaatje's "The Cinnamon Peeler" reinstated after it was removed because it contained a brief, semi-nude artistic photo.



2. He swears he records his voice on a Rode Podcaster microphone but it seems more likely that he uses Optical Character Recognition and voice generation software to create the robotic effect of an old Englishman about to fall asleep, dragging all of us down with him.

There is a lot to admire about this man. He seems to have excellent taste in both poetry and hardware. He got YouTube to revise and expedite its policy regarding artistic nudity. He makes some lovely videos, using stanzaic text rather than the more common subtitle approach. He might be the second best known voice in poetry after Garrison Keillor, a thought that may disturb more people than it comforts.

How, then, could anyone this clever be so utterly lost when it comes to poetry presentation? (Mr. Bedlam shies away from the word "performance".) He can't possibly think that this is how humans want to hear anything, can he?

Actually, he addresses this very question in one of his videos. In doing so, he makes a number of insightful observations. Unfortunately, none of them support the point he's trying to make, which is that the solution to poets reading too fast is to read wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay too slowly and without inflection or intonation of any sort. He addresses the stark difference between himself, the omega, and those of the underlying poet, a near-alpha by the name of Tim Murphy:

"In fact, I read this poem as 'ponderously' as I could: more so than I usually would, in fact. I did so to demonstrate and defend a principle, and then to explain why I read the poem this way.

"If you hear most people read poetry, even poets themselves, it tends to go in one ear and out the other. To be understood, any speech has to be delivered slowly and expressively enough for the listener to grasp what is being said, consider it and form mental images, draw differences and inferences. A printed poem can be studied at length but a reading has only one shot at getting through to you: it's the difference between a movie and a novel.

"Shakespearian actors will deliver lines more quickly than they could possibly have occurred to the speaker. It's a common problem, particularly in amateur dramatics, where the cast speed up as the play progresses, delivering their lines instantly on hearing their cues. As Shakespeare himself said, they imitate humanity abominably."

So far, so good, although I could quibble about judging performance on the basis of bad performers. As they say, bad actors pause for breath, good ones pause for thought. Now Mr. Bedlam begins to overreach:

"The poet has a problem - he knows the poem too well. Asking him to read it is like asking the guy who designed something to write the instruction manual. What's obvious to the inventor isn't obvious to everybody else. It's the same trap as asking an artist to explain his own work: the artist is often unaware of what art he has created. The artist shouldn't explain for fear of limiting his genius and perhaps the poet shouldn't read for fear of trivialising his poem."

A quick straw poll: Who would pay a sizeable sum to watch William Shakespeare perform "Sonnet LXXIII"?

Thanks for your participation. You may all put your hands down now.

It is one thing to say that poets are terrible performers. Most are. It is quite another to suggest that their performance has no value, especially in discerning authorial intent.

"You can brood for hours over a written poem, thinking about nuances of meaning and imagery: not so, a poem read aloud. The reading has to bring out what Ezra called the melopoeia, the sound that the poem makes, its rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, assonances, onomatopoeia, etc.

"If this is the only time anybody is going to hear one of Mr. Murphy's poems, then this is his only shot at grabbing their attention and impressing them. And making them want more."

This point is worth highlighting since it is one that many contemporary poets fail to grasp. Our first exposure to a poem should be audiovisual, watching it being performed. Not recited, and certainly not read by or to us. And, yes, a good first impression can, indeed, inspire replay, just as it does with music, but not for any recording by Mr. Bedlam. Once is quite enough, thank you.

"But there's an inherent limitation in reading aloud too: a reading is only one 'take' and can only approach the ideal, it can never quite make the most of a lovely cadence that rings so perfectly in your mind's ears; it can only be one interpretation of what might have many nuances of meaning. Reading is more about the audible qualities of the poem than the sense of the poem: these are often mutually exclusive to some extent. A poem that sounds jaunty can be quite sinister etc."

Surely a key "audible quality" is the vitality, tone and inflection of natural speech, though, all of which are conspicuously absent from Mr. Bedlam's renditions. Now he ventures off the ledge, demonstrating some legerdemain and no small amount of hubris in comparing--favorably, no less--his meager talent with that of Mr. Murphy, sampled here (if your computer won't play the video click on "Launch in a new window" and wait a moment).

"I suggest that you listen to Mr. Murphy reading his own work, and see if you can remember anything he said afterwards. Then compare and contrast my manner of reading."

Mr. Bedlam is inviting comparison between his studio version of Mr. Murphy's best poem and a noisy, live performance of a number of lesser original pieces. (I have always argued that, regardless of material, performer or author, more than one poem at a time risks an overdose.) One could hardly imagine a sober, sane individual outside of his immediate family preferring Mr. Bedlam's tortoise nervosa version of any poem to the same one delivered by Tim Murphy.

As we saw with John Marcus Powell, Mr. Bedlam makes the error of confusing the part with the whole; performance involves much more than clarity of enunciation. As for it being memorable, is it memorably good, like sex and William Shakespeare, or memorably bad, like root canals and William McGonagall? Personally, I rarely remember things that lull me to sleep. I'm funny that way.

The Brulber

Like all too many others in the poetry world, Mr. Bedlam adopts an ostrich approach when faced with criticism. He has set his YouTube posts to not allow thumbs up or down, no doubt because of a preponderance of the latter. He deletes any comments that aren't flattering. This Convenient Poetics activism is rampant among careerists. It's like blurbing in reverse. We need to coin a new term for this turtle shell stance: "to brulb".

In light of his rationalizations and brulbing, prospects for Mr. Bedlam improving are bleak, at best.

Performers: The Librarian

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Here's a tip: If voice is the best thing a blurber can say about a poet, run like a scalded dog. Chances are, the blurber is actually talking about the poet's style as opposed to the persona's idiolect. If so, the tout is saying the poet is different as opposed to good.

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A collection by "poet/performer" John Marcus Powell was recently published on TheHyperTexts. As a general rule, I don't write reviews but, to speed discussion along, here are my impressions of what I read:

Every option or reference, no matter how trivial or tangential, is pursued in parentheses, em dashes or obliques as if by a paranoid pedant. At every point the audience expects to hear "But I digress..." That moment of self-awareness never arrives. Each "poem" is a tedious argument of insidious intent, spread out like yellow fog, causing those who have come to go, lest they be etherized. Modifiers are chosen at random and rendered shotgun style for "poetic effect". While witty in places, the writing is utterly devoid of technique, rhythm, sonics or coherence.

In short, it's typical open mic fare. Too precious for slam. Defended only by loyal associates of the author, who assure us that Mr. Powell is a bright, gregarious fellow, one gets the sense that some people feel poetry is defined as whatever their friends write. All of this being the case, Mr. Powell doesn't warrant this or any other kind of attention. So why do I mention him?

Mr. Powell is described as a struggling actor and poetry performer. His supporters assure us that if we were to hear his work delivered in his voice we'd enjoy it and, more specifically, we'd hear the rhythm that is missing from the page. I've seen this movie before. We check out the audio, only to find it even less rhythmic than the page, or we witness it being delivered in an affected manner to effect a cadence. Occasionally we hear both, as here:





176 views at the time of this writing. Two "likes". A more self-conscious performance would be hard to imagine. Mr. Powell overenunciates in his readings. The exaggerated articulation suggests that he feels his words are memorable, a notion contradicted by the fact that he himself doesn't bother to memorize them. He stresses words at random, apparently astonished by desultory events in his own narrative, often punctuated by him looking up to see if his audience is similarly surprised.

"I was sitting at my table...having LUNCH!"

Gee, what an odd thing to do at a table!

I knew I'd seen this kind of reading before but it took me hours of scouring my memory banks to bring to mind the source. Finally, it occurred to me: this is almost identical to Billy Van's comedy skits as The Librarian on "The Hilarious House of Frightenstein", an old children's show we might find in reruns on the Space channel. We half-expect Mr. Powell to look up and ask "Are your frightened?" Were he to do so, that alienating device would be the only technique found in his writing or performance.

Rhythmic? Hardly. If anything, this weird syncopation is less so than a natural reading would be. The stresses occur with the same patterned regularity and predictability as bingo numbers do. Nevertheless, Mr. Powell's shills insist that he is a better performer than most poets.

What is truly frightening is that they may be right.

Kudos Again to Contemporary Poetry Review

If you have not already done so, please take a moment to read "Short Cuts: Roy Nicosia on a Post-Dementia Poet" on Contemporary Poetry Review. We see the critic make a number of excellent points.

• "Forty years ago, Randall Jarrell sadly proclaimed that the gods who had taken away the poet’s readers had replaced them with students. These days, the students have disappeared as well, and been replaced by prizes."



• "Some might call this exciting or interesting, the pure play of language, but once you’ve watched every poem in the book metastasize after a few lines into an absurdist doodle, it’s no more interesting than wading though your computer’s spam filter."



• "Beyond here, the reader cannot go: parody becomes impossible in the midst of such self-parody."



• "The problem with banality is that it’s merely the pleasant face of hardened indifference. To have an audience, you must care about a reader: that statistical non-entity who must purchase your book, read your poems, and be moved enough to remember or even memorize a line or two. So much contemporary poetry seems written for the void, for no one at all— like spam email, it is merely sent out by publishers conditioned to shrug at the public’s indifference."

That's almost the whole article! Brilliant!

Mr. Nicosia cites Ms. Hughey's “What Bird” to make a point:

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Bulbs, gravel, driveway.

I had hyacinth on my mouth.

The city, without thinking,

will arrive with photographs.

Or it could, even in winter,

Tap at the glass, at the birdbath,

to be asked to speak.

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When I first read this piece I said to myself: "That ain't poetry, it's homework."

Roy Nicosia goes on to argue that this effort is typical not only of Ms. Hughey’s work but of contemporary print world poetry in general. The poem is an assignment and we're supposed to go home and decipher it.

It would seem, then, that Roy and I are in agreement on this point. We are, but my initial reaction was that it was a finished homework assignment. That day's class had to have been on the subject of assonance and Elizabeth Hughey returned with an effort which illustrates that technique and nothing else: not rhythm, not finely wrought metaphors (as Roy points out), not even other aspects of sound (e.g. consonance, alliteration, etc.).

I'd have given it an "A+".

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20 Minutes that Can Change a Poet's Life

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"I always joke with my students that, if poetry was as hard as you think it is, poets wouldn’t do it because poets are among the stupidest and laziest people I know."

- Christian Bök in "The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry"

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Let's revisit an old theme with a tiny test, shall we?


1. T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is:

• Free verse.
• Metrical.
• Someone told me it was free verse but I wouldn't know on my own.
• Someone told me it was metrical but I wouldn't know on my own.
• Other/unknown.

2. William Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" is:

• Trochaic tetrameter.
• Iambic tetrameter.
• Someone told me it was trochaic tetrameter but I wouldn't know on my own.
• Someone told me it was iambic tetrameter but I wouldn't know on my own.
• Other/unknown.

3. Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet (1979)" is:

• Free verse.
• Accentual meter.
• Accentual-syllabic meter.
• I've been told it's free verse but I wouldn't know on my own.
• I've been told it's accentual meter but I wouldn't know on my own.
• I've been told it's accentual-syllabic meter but I wouldn't know on my own.
• Other/unknown.

If you got these three simple questions right on your own then, unlike more than 70% of PhD holders, more than 80% of MFA graduates and almost 97% of total poets (with or without degrees) tested, you understand the rudiments of scansion. You can probably recognize meter within three lines, know why some poets' popularity rises or falls in inverse relation to the public's ear for scansion, and prefer root canals to most poetry readings. You don't need to be told the distinction between verse and free verse or between free verse and prose poetry; your refined ear detects the difference immediately. Nor do you need to be told whether or not free verse poems are written by someone who understands verse; that, too, is usually obvious. You likely find the PoBiz, the blogosphere, and Content Regents unbearable. You couldn't write as badly as Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Carol Ann Duffy if your life depended on it.

"Why," a neophyte might ask, "should I learn about scansion? I write free verse!"

No, you don't. In fact, you'll win two lotteries before you write your first free verse poem. A "poet" with no grasp of meter is like a doctor who doesn't know what blood is.

"But I'm a dermatologist!"

Not mine, certainly.

If you are among the vast majority of poets who didn't ace this test or aren't entirely sure about the answers I have some wonderful news for you. There is a site where, 20 minutes from now, you will comprehend scansion better than the authors of at least two well known technical manuals and better than some famous poets, including Edgar Allan Poe. Here's the kicker: this lesson can be encapsulated in a grand total of eight words--five, if you don't mind an acronym! (The rest of the treatise involves supporting examples, jargon and explanations.)

I have one caveat, though: do not try the tests at the end yet. Practice your skills for a year or so before attempting the easier quiz, a decade or so before the tougher one.

The site is called "How to Scan a Poem".

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P.S.: The correct answer to all three questions was the second one.

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The Dumbest Things Poets Do - Part I

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Put freedom to a vote.
Just let the people choose
and in the end you'll note
that it will always lose.

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Ever wonder how I got all these gray hairs? Would you believe that I started life as a red squirrel? This graying is from worrying that my focus on the inane things that some poets say might cause us to overlook the idiotic things that some poets do. We've all heard of versers accosting shoppers outside mall entrances. In "The artist vandalising advertising with poetry" we read of a more egregious example.

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"Scottish artist Robert Montgomery goes about at night illegally plastering over advertisements with posters covered in his poetry."

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Just as "stupid is as stupid does", imbecilic actions are often supported by imbecilic people. Arguments about illegality will make no impression on the incorrigibly moronic. They'll blather on about "speaking truth to power", "occupying", "sticking it to the man", blah, blah, blah. They present it as a political statement. Needless to say, crosscultural references to Chileans on the right and left plastering over each others' signage until the posts fall down will be a waste of breath. This is the Ido Effect: Part of being a dumbass is not knowing you're a dumbass.

They argue about freedom of expression, unaware that this is, while simple enough for a squirrel to grok, a concept as far beyond their comprehension as Alpha Centauri is beyond their doorsteps. Who wants to try to explain to them that, in covering the ads, Mr. Montgomery is curtailing the free speech of the person who bought and paid for that space? Surely they wouldn't object if, tit-for-tat, the billboard owner were to cover their front windows with ads, would they? They wouldn't complain if someone sent them a computer virus that replaces whatever they post online with "news" of an Erectile Dysfunction cure, would they?

In their perfect world semiliterate wannabes like Mr. Montgomery would have the final word on who gets to say what and where, irrespective of who rented the space or owns the property. If only someone had invented a medium where everyone could post whatever "very pleasing verse" they choose without affecting the rights of those whose speech they find unpalatable.

Oh, wait...