No.24 - May 2018
Poetry Aloud, Part 5:
String Too Short To Be Saved
String Too Short To Be Saved
As the old joke goes, if I’d known I’d live this long I would have taken better care of myself. Similarly, if I’d anticipated I’d be writing these personal reflections on poetry readings, I would have taken better notes at the time. Or any notes at all.
Anyway, what follows this month are some briefer snapshots: anecdotes, memories, and reflections of poetic encounters I’ve had spanning the better part of five decades. Plus a bit of writerly gossip. All are filtered through that notoriously unreliable medium, memory, so I can’t vouch for their absolute fidelity to detail or date. I’m after what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call basic truths of presenting poetry aloud. I’ll pin each item on a single poet, mostly well known elders, many now no longer with us. For a title I’ve lifted one of Donald Hall’s, his marvelous memoir of his childhood—the joke being that he found in his grandparents’ attic a box labeled “string too short to be saved”—all carefully saved, of course. Or so I remember; I haven’t re-read his book in years.
Donald Hall
And I begin with Hall because he was a key influence on my early thinking about the art of reading aloud. In his prime he was among the best I’ve ever heard. He had a great instrument, a resonant and clear radio-ready voice that he deployed skillfully and subtly, without hamming it up as bad actors often do when reading poetry. He was funny, self-deprecating, and wore his erudition lightly. He knew how to pace a reading, varying the amount of patter in between poems, and providing a good mix of tones and styles. Often he would talk about poems in terms of their sounds rather than their themes. One time he remarked that a particular stanza had pleased him not so much for what it said, but because he had managed to fit almost all the possible vowel tones into it. He then read it again to demonstrate, pronouncing only the vowels. It was goofy but he was also dead serious: a real ear-opener for me. Above all, when he read, he beautifully practiced what he preached in his many essays, reviews, and texts on poetry, about the pleasures of pure sound and rhythm.
I attended a number of his readings in those early years, and soon discovered he was generous with his time and attention offstage, too. There was nothing of the prima donna about him. On several occasions he was quite nice to this young poet. One night in particular I’ve long remembered. The reading was in Worcester MA, probably 1976. It was the custom then to host any willing poet at an after-reading party at someone’s home. That night I had volunteered our apartment, but to my dismay a big New England snowstorm commenced. I feared Hall might beg off due to weather. But he arrived, hearty and happy, and sat down in one of our ragged wingback chairs with a bottle of whiskey. He chatted and gossiped as if we were all old friends. (He could be catty. I asked him what he thought of a particular younger poet, much praised at the time, and he just smiled and said, “tepid.”) At some point late in the evening, responding to someone who’d asked him about favorite poets, he began reciting great gobs of poetry aloud, all from memory. I remember Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, E. A. Robinson, Emily Dickinson; there may have been more. I found myself “getting” Hardy in a way I never had before. The ear can be more intelligent than the mind sometimes.
The night grew late, and I began to worry Hall might depart before I had to go fetch my wife from working a late shift. I really wanted her to meet him. When the time came, I reluctantly got in our car and left the party. I’d told my friends to keep Hall there as long as possible. Of course, when we returned, our car fishtailing through the snowy city streets, he was gone. I was quite disappointed. The next morning, though, when I pulled one of his books off the shelf to re-read some poems, I discovered that he had apparently gone into my study before he left, and signed it. I still have that book, with the inscription he scribbled before he had to go: “For Dave, in the snow....”
Very often the best part of a poetry reading is the party afterward.
Elizabeth Bishop
If Hall was one of the best readers I’ve ever heard, Bishop has few rivals for worst. It was around 1974 or 1975, at Dartmouth College. After the typical lavish introduction, she sort of wandered on stage, and began. I don’t recall any pleasantries or comments on the poems, just poem poem poem without any commentary beyond announcing the title. I can’t remember a single poem she read, mainly because I could barely hear her. Nothing but a soft mumble up there at the podium in a big auditorium, Bishop hardly looking at the audience: all in all she seemed to be having just as bad a time as we were. She didn’t read very long, and that was a blessing.
That was one of my first instances of a lesson that unfortunately I’ve re-learned many times since, that writing a poem is a skill entirely distinct from performing it aloud. Some great poets (and I would call Bishop great) simply are terrible readers. Whether out of shyness or lack of interest or some other reason, she just did not do anything to put her work over to her audience. It was almost as if she herself did not think her poems were any good. I know better now, but I am sorry to report that her awful reading put me off her work for years, until eventually I realized that, on the page, at least, she is a magical poet.
Derek Walcott
I heard Walcott read, I think, on three different occasions, once each in the 1970s, the 80s, and finally the 90s. The first time was at Mt. Holyoke College. I barely knew his work at the time, and was blown away by his charisma, his strongly confident reading style, the power of his poems, and his stringent advice to the students in the audience. (Remarking, for example, that if you hope to amount to anything as a poet, you must be constantly reading Dryden, Milton, and the rest of the traditional English canon.) In the 80s he came to Virginia Tech, where I was then teaching, and delivered a lecture as well as a dynamite reading. By then I was a big fan of his work, and I was not disappointed. He was dynamic and charismatic. His reading style was perhaps enhanced by his experience in the theater, which surely provided him with a sense of how to present himself.
The final time I heard him was sometime in the 1990s in Milwaukee. I’m sorry to say he was dreadful. He read for a very short time, seemed out of sorts, and was notably cranky. He rushed through the poems, and departed quickly without signing books or talking to many people.
This story reminds me of something I too seldom reflect on. For me, seeing Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (or any star performer) is a special occasion, intrinsically memorable, something to tell stories about decades later. But for Walcott, it was just another reading among hundreds, if not thousands. He might have been tired. Just as you can’t judge a poet by one poem, you can’t generalize from a single occasion about anyone’s prowess as a performer. It’s even possible, I suppose, that Elizabeth Bishop was capable of a fine reading, though I sort of doubt it. I have no idea why Walcott was “off” that day, but though I was surely disappointed, his work will survive any poor performance.
Stanley Kunitz
Another early reading in my Worcester days in the mid-seventies. Kunitz, like Bishop, was one of the great elders, and like Bishop he happened to be a native of Worcester. The auditorium at the public library was packed for the appearance of this native son. I had read his books and liked his work. But turns out I truly hated his reading style. Unlike Bishop, Kunitz did perform his poems quite energetically. The problem? He was too old fashioned. He declaimed like a 19th Century actor in a melodrama. I found it corny and stagey to the extreme. Later when I had studied such matters more, I realized he had come of age in the era when that older style of recitation hadn’t yet died out. Born in 1905, Kunitz grew up before radio and modern microphone technology gradually replaced the older style of belting out speeches and songs without electronic amplification. He had no doubt heard sermons, poetry, and speeches declaimed in grand style. In contrast, I was familiar with and expected a much subtler, more intimate reading style, especially for lyric poetry. Later, when I began teaching, I was chagrined to find that even readers as great as Dylan Thomas (who was a BBC radio pro with a microphone) struck my students as corny and old fashioned. They liked his poems just fine, but his reading style they found boring and fusty. So in pushing on them recordings of Thomas, now I was the one who was too old fashioned. Fashions of reading aloud evolve constantly over time, and there’s not much point in complaining about it.
Allen Ginsberg
Perhaps I may be forgiven for the fact that I turned down my first chance to hear Ginsberg. It was sometime in the very early 1970s. I was in college then, and, with the splendid snobbery of the young, had decided that this pivotal poet was not worth my time. He was washed up, his best work far in the past. I had of course absorbed much of this unfortunate arrogance from professors and critics. It’s hard to remember these days, when Ginsberg is prominently featured in every anthology and universally considered an important figure, that this was a time when to many academics the jury still seemed to be out about him. (Donald Hall, writing in 1963, expressed the attitude, still common at my college in the 70s, that the Beat poets as a group had produced, at most, “several good lines.” Like me, he later changed his mind.) With the notable exception of my early mentor Sydney Lea, none of my literature professors had anything good to say about Ginsberg. So I skipped the reading. (I also passed up Duke Ellington on one of his last tours, but that’s another story in the annals of my stupidity.)
Quite soon I regretted it, of course. I didn’t get the chance to make up for it until about 1988 or 1989, the occasion being the reading tour Ginsberg gave in support of what a friend called “Big Red,” his enormous collected poems. It was at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, and a less “Beat” gathering you could not imagine. The big ballroom was filled with tweedy academics, and Ginsberg was his boisterous self, though by now gray, bald, and wrinkled. He read the entirety of “Howl,” which by then I was really ready for. A magical occasion. He also brought a guitarist along, and with that accompaniment, sang a series of settings of Blake’s songs in his truly awful baritone voice. He was off-key and his tempos were wobbly, but he soon had several hundred academics singing along and swaying to these great songs. I hope I’ll never forget that night. It wasn’t about the musical quality of this particular performance; it was about being part of this occasion, one of this living crowd paying collective tribute, with voice and body, to great literature.
Galway Kinnell
Kinnell rivals Donald Hall for one of the best readers aloud of that generation. I heard him a good number of times over the years. He also had the gift of a large memory, and usually performed even quite lengthy poems without glancing at the book in his hand. The second or third time I caught him live, though, he was terrible. He stammered and made mistakes, and looked a bit lost. I found myself wondering if he was hung over or down with the flu. The reading was at Clark University in the 1970s, and as usual on such occasions, there were a lot of students in attendance, many with books open on their laps. Plainly it was either a class assignment or they were getting extra credit for attendance.
Finally Kinnell stopped and addressed the students. He noted that many of them with his books were following along as he recited. He told them to put the books away and just listen. It was messing him up, he confessed; he kept worrying that he’d forget a line or mangle one, and they’d catch him at it. Everyone laughed, but he was quite serious. He refused to continue until he couldn’t see any open books in the audience. Then he resumed reading, and was back to his splendid self.
There are probably several lessons here. One of them, I’d say, is simply a reminder that a poetry reading, especially in our visually-obsessed, plugged-in culture, harkens back to the most ancient roots of literature as oral performance. Long before there were books, or even written language, poetry was performed aloud. All it takes is a single voice, and someone to listen. Sometimes we need reminding of this obvious but crucial fact. Moreover, often poetry is best experienced not with the eyes but the ears. And there’s something primal about just listening that is lost when all you use is your eyes. A further lesson might be that many of us aren’t used to listening with the kind of care that poetry often requires. It can take practice for the audience, not just for the reader.
Michael Harper
I heard Harper on a number of occasions, again spaced over several decades. One thing I greatly admired about him was that he always made a point of reading work by other poets. I especially recall him devoting a lot of time at a reading in 1981 to reading and praising the work of the older & then still oddly neglected poet Robert Hayden. It was Harper’s performance at that time that really turned me on to Hayden’s work and made me a lifelong devotee.
On that occasion I was also his host and introducer, because I had rashly volunteered to put on a reading series at an arts festival on the county fairgrounds in Northampton, MA. Somehow I had persuaded Harper, a rather prominent poet, to read in a tent, offering him an embarrassingly small honorarium. He complained about the money and tried to bargain for more, but I had no more to offer. We were working on a small grant from the local university. He ultimately agreed to come.
Harper was a large man and could be rather intimidating in person, to say the least. So it was highly unfortunate that on the day of the reading, his tiny honorarium check had not arrived. It was not my fault, but he was in no mood to hear that. He had brought his family with him, and for a while it seemed he might refuse to go on stage. When effusive apologies did not sway him, in desperation I ran out into the fairgrounds and started borrowing various items from the vendors there (some might call this “stealing,” but I figured it was in the cause of art). I gathered up a bunch of T-shirts and other trinkets that I thought his kids might like, brought them back and presented them. To my great relief, his kids were delighted, and I could see their dad’s reflected pleasure. He relaxed and got on stage, where he proceeded to give an electrifying reading. I mailed the check to him several days later, with my abundant thanks. (I’m pretty sure I re-paid the vendors also, and I hope I made the university pay.)
Anyway, what follows this month are some briefer snapshots: anecdotes, memories, and reflections of poetic encounters I’ve had spanning the better part of five decades. Plus a bit of writerly gossip. All are filtered through that notoriously unreliable medium, memory, so I can’t vouch for their absolute fidelity to detail or date. I’m after what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call basic truths of presenting poetry aloud. I’ll pin each item on a single poet, mostly well known elders, many now no longer with us. For a title I’ve lifted one of Donald Hall’s, his marvelous memoir of his childhood—the joke being that he found in his grandparents’ attic a box labeled “string too short to be saved”—all carefully saved, of course. Or so I remember; I haven’t re-read his book in years.
Donald Hall
And I begin with Hall because he was a key influence on my early thinking about the art of reading aloud. In his prime he was among the best I’ve ever heard. He had a great instrument, a resonant and clear radio-ready voice that he deployed skillfully and subtly, without hamming it up as bad actors often do when reading poetry. He was funny, self-deprecating, and wore his erudition lightly. He knew how to pace a reading, varying the amount of patter in between poems, and providing a good mix of tones and styles. Often he would talk about poems in terms of their sounds rather than their themes. One time he remarked that a particular stanza had pleased him not so much for what it said, but because he had managed to fit almost all the possible vowel tones into it. He then read it again to demonstrate, pronouncing only the vowels. It was goofy but he was also dead serious: a real ear-opener for me. Above all, when he read, he beautifully practiced what he preached in his many essays, reviews, and texts on poetry, about the pleasures of pure sound and rhythm.
I attended a number of his readings in those early years, and soon discovered he was generous with his time and attention offstage, too. There was nothing of the prima donna about him. On several occasions he was quite nice to this young poet. One night in particular I’ve long remembered. The reading was in Worcester MA, probably 1976. It was the custom then to host any willing poet at an after-reading party at someone’s home. That night I had volunteered our apartment, but to my dismay a big New England snowstorm commenced. I feared Hall might beg off due to weather. But he arrived, hearty and happy, and sat down in one of our ragged wingback chairs with a bottle of whiskey. He chatted and gossiped as if we were all old friends. (He could be catty. I asked him what he thought of a particular younger poet, much praised at the time, and he just smiled and said, “tepid.”) At some point late in the evening, responding to someone who’d asked him about favorite poets, he began reciting great gobs of poetry aloud, all from memory. I remember Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, E. A. Robinson, Emily Dickinson; there may have been more. I found myself “getting” Hardy in a way I never had before. The ear can be more intelligent than the mind sometimes.
The night grew late, and I began to worry Hall might depart before I had to go fetch my wife from working a late shift. I really wanted her to meet him. When the time came, I reluctantly got in our car and left the party. I’d told my friends to keep Hall there as long as possible. Of course, when we returned, our car fishtailing through the snowy city streets, he was gone. I was quite disappointed. The next morning, though, when I pulled one of his books off the shelf to re-read some poems, I discovered that he had apparently gone into my study before he left, and signed it. I still have that book, with the inscription he scribbled before he had to go: “For Dave, in the snow....”
Very often the best part of a poetry reading is the party afterward.
Elizabeth Bishop
If Hall was one of the best readers I’ve ever heard, Bishop has few rivals for worst. It was around 1974 or 1975, at Dartmouth College. After the typical lavish introduction, she sort of wandered on stage, and began. I don’t recall any pleasantries or comments on the poems, just poem poem poem without any commentary beyond announcing the title. I can’t remember a single poem she read, mainly because I could barely hear her. Nothing but a soft mumble up there at the podium in a big auditorium, Bishop hardly looking at the audience: all in all she seemed to be having just as bad a time as we were. She didn’t read very long, and that was a blessing.
That was one of my first instances of a lesson that unfortunately I’ve re-learned many times since, that writing a poem is a skill entirely distinct from performing it aloud. Some great poets (and I would call Bishop great) simply are terrible readers. Whether out of shyness or lack of interest or some other reason, she just did not do anything to put her work over to her audience. It was almost as if she herself did not think her poems were any good. I know better now, but I am sorry to report that her awful reading put me off her work for years, until eventually I realized that, on the page, at least, she is a magical poet.
Derek Walcott
I heard Walcott read, I think, on three different occasions, once each in the 1970s, the 80s, and finally the 90s. The first time was at Mt. Holyoke College. I barely knew his work at the time, and was blown away by his charisma, his strongly confident reading style, the power of his poems, and his stringent advice to the students in the audience. (Remarking, for example, that if you hope to amount to anything as a poet, you must be constantly reading Dryden, Milton, and the rest of the traditional English canon.) In the 80s he came to Virginia Tech, where I was then teaching, and delivered a lecture as well as a dynamite reading. By then I was a big fan of his work, and I was not disappointed. He was dynamic and charismatic. His reading style was perhaps enhanced by his experience in the theater, which surely provided him with a sense of how to present himself.
The final time I heard him was sometime in the 1990s in Milwaukee. I’m sorry to say he was dreadful. He read for a very short time, seemed out of sorts, and was notably cranky. He rushed through the poems, and departed quickly without signing books or talking to many people.
This story reminds me of something I too seldom reflect on. For me, seeing Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (or any star performer) is a special occasion, intrinsically memorable, something to tell stories about decades later. But for Walcott, it was just another reading among hundreds, if not thousands. He might have been tired. Just as you can’t judge a poet by one poem, you can’t generalize from a single occasion about anyone’s prowess as a performer. It’s even possible, I suppose, that Elizabeth Bishop was capable of a fine reading, though I sort of doubt it. I have no idea why Walcott was “off” that day, but though I was surely disappointed, his work will survive any poor performance.
Stanley Kunitz
Another early reading in my Worcester days in the mid-seventies. Kunitz, like Bishop, was one of the great elders, and like Bishop he happened to be a native of Worcester. The auditorium at the public library was packed for the appearance of this native son. I had read his books and liked his work. But turns out I truly hated his reading style. Unlike Bishop, Kunitz did perform his poems quite energetically. The problem? He was too old fashioned. He declaimed like a 19th Century actor in a melodrama. I found it corny and stagey to the extreme. Later when I had studied such matters more, I realized he had come of age in the era when that older style of recitation hadn’t yet died out. Born in 1905, Kunitz grew up before radio and modern microphone technology gradually replaced the older style of belting out speeches and songs without electronic amplification. He had no doubt heard sermons, poetry, and speeches declaimed in grand style. In contrast, I was familiar with and expected a much subtler, more intimate reading style, especially for lyric poetry. Later, when I began teaching, I was chagrined to find that even readers as great as Dylan Thomas (who was a BBC radio pro with a microphone) struck my students as corny and old fashioned. They liked his poems just fine, but his reading style they found boring and fusty. So in pushing on them recordings of Thomas, now I was the one who was too old fashioned. Fashions of reading aloud evolve constantly over time, and there’s not much point in complaining about it.
Allen Ginsberg
Perhaps I may be forgiven for the fact that I turned down my first chance to hear Ginsberg. It was sometime in the very early 1970s. I was in college then, and, with the splendid snobbery of the young, had decided that this pivotal poet was not worth my time. He was washed up, his best work far in the past. I had of course absorbed much of this unfortunate arrogance from professors and critics. It’s hard to remember these days, when Ginsberg is prominently featured in every anthology and universally considered an important figure, that this was a time when to many academics the jury still seemed to be out about him. (Donald Hall, writing in 1963, expressed the attitude, still common at my college in the 70s, that the Beat poets as a group had produced, at most, “several good lines.” Like me, he later changed his mind.) With the notable exception of my early mentor Sydney Lea, none of my literature professors had anything good to say about Ginsberg. So I skipped the reading. (I also passed up Duke Ellington on one of his last tours, but that’s another story in the annals of my stupidity.)
Quite soon I regretted it, of course. I didn’t get the chance to make up for it until about 1988 or 1989, the occasion being the reading tour Ginsberg gave in support of what a friend called “Big Red,” his enormous collected poems. It was at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, and a less “Beat” gathering you could not imagine. The big ballroom was filled with tweedy academics, and Ginsberg was his boisterous self, though by now gray, bald, and wrinkled. He read the entirety of “Howl,” which by then I was really ready for. A magical occasion. He also brought a guitarist along, and with that accompaniment, sang a series of settings of Blake’s songs in his truly awful baritone voice. He was off-key and his tempos were wobbly, but he soon had several hundred academics singing along and swaying to these great songs. I hope I’ll never forget that night. It wasn’t about the musical quality of this particular performance; it was about being part of this occasion, one of this living crowd paying collective tribute, with voice and body, to great literature.
Galway Kinnell
Kinnell rivals Donald Hall for one of the best readers aloud of that generation. I heard him a good number of times over the years. He also had the gift of a large memory, and usually performed even quite lengthy poems without glancing at the book in his hand. The second or third time I caught him live, though, he was terrible. He stammered and made mistakes, and looked a bit lost. I found myself wondering if he was hung over or down with the flu. The reading was at Clark University in the 1970s, and as usual on such occasions, there were a lot of students in attendance, many with books open on their laps. Plainly it was either a class assignment or they were getting extra credit for attendance.
Finally Kinnell stopped and addressed the students. He noted that many of them with his books were following along as he recited. He told them to put the books away and just listen. It was messing him up, he confessed; he kept worrying that he’d forget a line or mangle one, and they’d catch him at it. Everyone laughed, but he was quite serious. He refused to continue until he couldn’t see any open books in the audience. Then he resumed reading, and was back to his splendid self.
There are probably several lessons here. One of them, I’d say, is simply a reminder that a poetry reading, especially in our visually-obsessed, plugged-in culture, harkens back to the most ancient roots of literature as oral performance. Long before there were books, or even written language, poetry was performed aloud. All it takes is a single voice, and someone to listen. Sometimes we need reminding of this obvious but crucial fact. Moreover, often poetry is best experienced not with the eyes but the ears. And there’s something primal about just listening that is lost when all you use is your eyes. A further lesson might be that many of us aren’t used to listening with the kind of care that poetry often requires. It can take practice for the audience, not just for the reader.
Michael Harper
I heard Harper on a number of occasions, again spaced over several decades. One thing I greatly admired about him was that he always made a point of reading work by other poets. I especially recall him devoting a lot of time at a reading in 1981 to reading and praising the work of the older & then still oddly neglected poet Robert Hayden. It was Harper’s performance at that time that really turned me on to Hayden’s work and made me a lifelong devotee.
On that occasion I was also his host and introducer, because I had rashly volunteered to put on a reading series at an arts festival on the county fairgrounds in Northampton, MA. Somehow I had persuaded Harper, a rather prominent poet, to read in a tent, offering him an embarrassingly small honorarium. He complained about the money and tried to bargain for more, but I had no more to offer. We were working on a small grant from the local university. He ultimately agreed to come.
Harper was a large man and could be rather intimidating in person, to say the least. So it was highly unfortunate that on the day of the reading, his tiny honorarium check had not arrived. It was not my fault, but he was in no mood to hear that. He had brought his family with him, and for a while it seemed he might refuse to go on stage. When effusive apologies did not sway him, in desperation I ran out into the fairgrounds and started borrowing various items from the vendors there (some might call this “stealing,” but I figured it was in the cause of art). I gathered up a bunch of T-shirts and other trinkets that I thought his kids might like, brought them back and presented them. To my great relief, his kids were delighted, and I could see their dad’s reflected pleasure. He relaxed and got on stage, where he proceeded to give an electrifying reading. I mailed the check to him several days later, with my abundant thanks. (I’m pretty sure I re-paid the vendors also, and I hope I made the university pay.)
Tomas Tranströmer
I’ve told this next anecdote so often over many years that I finally turned it into a poem. I can’t resist adding it to this month’s reminiscences. Unlike many poems that I write, this one, about meeting the great Swedish Nobel Laureate, is true to the facts as I remember them. It happened in Worcester, MA, but I can’t say what year. I know I was still rather young. I also don’t know what it is that makes people wish to collect poets’ signatures on their books, but over the years I’ve often done so mainly as an excuse to talk with poets I admire. As recounted in the poem, sometimes there are further benefits to meeting great poets.
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Yusef Komunyakaa
I fell in love with Komunyakaa’s work long before I heard him in person. Good thing. Once I had attended a couple of his readings I was ready to slot him in the Elizabeth Bishop category: great poet who just couldn’t or wouldn’t perform them effectively. He was a nearly textbook example of things you shouldn’t do. He didn’t place poems in context or help the audience with difficult references. He recited in what I’ve come to call machine-gun style, just one poem after the other with no space in between for the listeners to reflect and savor. Often he didn’t even say the title. He didn’t make much eye contact, but buried his nose in a book. There was absolutely no effort to be engaging, much less charming. He mumbled and swallowed words. Worst of all, he seemed to derive no pleasure from transmitting these marvelous works of art aloud. He made the glorious act of reading poetry seem like a chore.
Then more recently I caught Komunyakaa at a large writers’ conference. I generally don’t find such venues conducive to memorable reading experiences: they’re usually in large echoey hotel ballrooms, with iffy acoustics, uncomfortable chairs, and an audience that tends to drift in and out, both physically and mentally. They also tend to feature multiple readers. By the time I heard Komunyakaa, I had sat through many panels, lectures, and readings, and my brain was fried. Still, he was a poet I much admired, and I hadn’t heard him read his newer work, so there I was.
All his flaws as a reader were on display, but for some reason I found myself mesmerized. I can’t explain it, but it was like every word was being read just to me. It was strangely moving. Afterward, as I was shuffling through the crowd on my way out, still reeling, I ran into an old friend, who looked just as dazed as I felt. He said to me, “Is it just me, or was that an amazing reading?” Neither of us could explain it. Komunyakaa broke all the rules, but somehow the work itself managed to overcome his weakness as a performer. You just never know.
It is in the hope of experiences like this one, surprising and uplifting, that I keep going to poetry readings even though many do turn out to be disappointing.
Yusef Komunyakaa
I fell in love with Komunyakaa’s work long before I heard him in person. Good thing. Once I had attended a couple of his readings I was ready to slot him in the Elizabeth Bishop category: great poet who just couldn’t or wouldn’t perform them effectively. He was a nearly textbook example of things you shouldn’t do. He didn’t place poems in context or help the audience with difficult references. He recited in what I’ve come to call machine-gun style, just one poem after the other with no space in between for the listeners to reflect and savor. Often he didn’t even say the title. He didn’t make much eye contact, but buried his nose in a book. There was absolutely no effort to be engaging, much less charming. He mumbled and swallowed words. Worst of all, he seemed to derive no pleasure from transmitting these marvelous works of art aloud. He made the glorious act of reading poetry seem like a chore.
Then more recently I caught Komunyakaa at a large writers’ conference. I generally don’t find such venues conducive to memorable reading experiences: they’re usually in large echoey hotel ballrooms, with iffy acoustics, uncomfortable chairs, and an audience that tends to drift in and out, both physically and mentally. They also tend to feature multiple readers. By the time I heard Komunyakaa, I had sat through many panels, lectures, and readings, and my brain was fried. Still, he was a poet I much admired, and I hadn’t heard him read his newer work, so there I was.
All his flaws as a reader were on display, but for some reason I found myself mesmerized. I can’t explain it, but it was like every word was being read just to me. It was strangely moving. Afterward, as I was shuffling through the crowd on my way out, still reeling, I ran into an old friend, who looked just as dazed as I felt. He said to me, “Is it just me, or was that an amazing reading?” Neither of us could explain it. Komunyakaa broke all the rules, but somehow the work itself managed to overcome his weakness as a performer. You just never know.
It is in the hope of experiences like this one, surprising and uplifting, that I keep going to poetry readings even though many do turn out to be disappointing.
©2018 David Graham
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