HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Don’t make noise just to make noise. If you’re going to play, play something good.

Spread the Word

While it seems, as Dana Gioia predicted (read previous blog entry), that performance has become the new lifeblood of poetry, not everyone is so pleased by this prospect. Least of all, people that were enamored with the secret society of the academy and who wanted poetry to stay there, for its authentic place to be seen as being there. The simple proposition that yea-and-nay sayers can agree on is that the two different worlds of poetry are worlds apart. The belief among many defenders of the old guard seems to be that performance is not really poetry, but something of a bastard step child, an unwanted guest at the table. Who can deny that this new poetry is inferior in technique and high theory? Though that’s far from what matters about the new poetic form, it’s a sticking point for many like David Groff, whose picture looks as distempered as his essay.

The thrust of Groff’s essay is the assertion that the enjoyment of performance is not a literary pleasure, is more primal and less intellectual, and this lowering of the bar damages the art form. Towards the end of this essay, Groff seems to suggest that what really matters is book sales, when he says:

Gathering warm bodies for a public reading doesn’t automatically translate into more people heading to a bookstore or poring over poems on their own time. And of course, if a poem is ill-presented—as so many so often are, since a majority of poets either act as if they’re encountering their own poems for the first time, or else histrionically wring every atom of significance from them—potential book-buyers can be driven away from poems that work wonderfully on the page.

This argument, if I’m understanding it correctly, is in bad faith. Since when is sales the measure of success? Maybe it is for a professional poet like Groff, but for the general public, what matters is the dissemination of the word, and access to it. At this, the new poetic has been wildly successful, as can be seen here:

LISTING OF POETRY EVENTS IN NYC

2nd cousins

The idea is to weave different media elements together into a coherent tapestry. The possibilities are limitless, so eventually you just have to pick and go. So I’m going, having picked.

My central focus is the notion that performance poetry (in all its various forms) is becoming the only relevant form of poetry. The musings of academics are far removed from ordinary people, so what are they really good for, except for providing an elevated inside joke of sorts. This isn’t to disparage erudite, professional poetry; only to suggest that it might as well be dead because only a few tweedy old gentlemen and ambitious grad students are reading it.

This topic is not new. It’s been covered through and through by better qualified men than me.

Dana Gioia, current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has written extensively on the subject. His best known essay on this topic, Can Poetry Matter?, was published in 1991 and predicted much of what has happened in poetry in the intervening years. The opening remarks are written (his italics):

Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world,                                                                                    they can work to make it essential once more.

That choice has not been left up to established poets. They have been bypassed by young nobodies who have risen out of obscurity to create a viable spoken-word scene. The number of venues hosting slams and other types of performance readings has grown rapidly, along with those dedicated specifically to the art form. The ranks of young poets are swelling. This is all due to poetry’s return to common culture from the distant heights it has been held at for most of the last 100 years. Essays on this topic are easy to find, but the central idea that I have come to admire is – this is nothing new, this is a return to the position that poets have held in society since time immemorial; the poet as storyteller, entertainer, and  eloquent voice of social conscience. It predates Homer. Poetry is essentially a populist artform, and only relatively recently has it been cloistered in the stuffy halls of the academy. The two kinds of Poetry are separate artforms, 2nd cousins.

Therapeutic Value

The Bowery Poetry Club is perhaps most important in it’s role as a nexus for all things performance poetry happening in the City. This creates a collaborative, cross-fertilizing opportunity for the poets, thus encouraging innovation, while providing the audience with precious insight into the current performance poetry landscape (at least that of New York). The range of shows is spectacular. For the next several Sundays, rather serious seminars will be held about the impact and legacy of major New York poets like Whitman and Ginsberg. Then this coming Tuesday, a poetry and avant-jazz trio will be providing an alternative soundtrack to the silent 1925 classic, “The Lost World,” which will be playing on the big screen on stage. These two programs are isolated events of the type always moving through the BPC. In the regular lineup, every Saturday there is a college slam competition followed by a professional poetry show, of some sort.

I have noticed a salient feature of all the young poets that read in these amateur competitions – they all seem to be wrestling with massive inner demons and childhood scars. Last week, two of the winning poets rapped about having been raped, and growing up without a father. The young man that grew up without a father had been stabbed in the face as a boy and had a damaged left eye. Their readings were both powerful, even approaching sublime at moments. However, I think I was more moved by their poems that weren’t about their inner pain, though that is, in itself, very jarring. Perhaps I would not have felt that way if I didn’t already know some of their secrets by the time they got around to reading their less personal stuff. For instance, Kareem (the young man with the damaged eye) took the stage for his final reading and said, a little shyly, “This one’s about nature…I like nature,” and then recited a beautiful description of full clouds before a downpour and at sunset. I hope to post that video on this blog this weekend.

Wherever it is, it ain’t at school

As I’ve been reading about new American poetry, I have repeatedly come across assertions stressing the difficulty of describing the contemporary poetry scene, for all its diffuseness. As Hank Lazar suggested, the field is so “atomized, decentralized, and multifaceted” that “no one can pretend to know what is out there, or what is next.” Almost as often, I am finding assertions that “something new” is happening, for all of the difficulty in describing it. If not nail it wriggling to the wall, I hope to catch and convey a glimpse.

I briefly walked down one path in my research, before catching myself and running in the other direction. That is to say, I started researching modern academic poetry – that complex, arcane science that seems to me impossibly removed from common access. Let the institutions have it! I’m not maligning it. But my concern with this piece of journalism is to find how performance poetry is carving a niche in popular culture, not whether it is poo-pooed or praised by professors.

Among enthusiasts, there is the belief that performance poetry is a return to poetry’s roots – an oral tradition by and for the common people, to make sense of and lift themselves out of their everyday lives; poetry as a populist art form. The basic functions of art – holding a mirror to society, inspiring reflection, introspection, and joy in the sublime – are carried out by television and movies for many people. Can poetry reclaim a place in average American lives? Many of the essays that I am reading boldly declare that it can and is in the process of so doing. Acclaimed poet Luis Rodriguez said, “The fact is, poetry is having a resurgence in America, and mostly from the communities and populations normally not considered poetic, such as the homeless, gang members, midwives, prisoners, carpenters, etc.” So often, art is created in a crucible of sorts, from life’s pressures. It seems natural to me that poetry should come from the unsung places. I am starting to understand how the poetry of the masses and of the academies are entirely separate things.

This is a rough video from the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan that I cut the other day. I had to keep it within narrow time specifications, and the lighting is bad, but I intend to improve and repost it, as well as several other videos of whole performances from this night.

So catch a glimpse (if I did it well enough to provide that).

Taylor Mead, with a secure lead on the pushing-90 circuit

It’s a coincidence that I ended up, after all, basing my documentary on poetry in Manhattan and the Bowery Poetry Club as the nexus of it (the BPC does hold that distinction, with the greatest sheer variety). This was one of my first ideas, but I felt like it was too fluffy, or something like that. But this is not the coincidence. That would be the fact that one of the very first images I shot with the camcorder that I bought for this class was a poetry reading at the BPC, that I just happened to be at. One of the notables was Taylor Mead, a very old man who was once part of Andy Warhol’s factory scene. He name dropped Warhol incessantly, in case the audience missed the point.

Anyhow, he was damn good. SEEEEE:

Though Taylor was swamped with sycophants that night, I have a feeling that he would do an interview. He does a show at the BPC every Friday night. He lives in the neighborhood and this is just part of his weekly ritual. He was such a peculiar old man. Though he must be in his Eighties, he talked about his father and his family as if he were still the prodigal child, or the black sheep that embarrassed his aristocratic parents. He even said at one point, “The problem with growing old is that you’re still young.” From interviews with him that I have seen, it seems that he is pretty well established as a local historical authority on a certain scene – Warhol, 1960’s New York, the Art scene at that time. He is fascinating in himself, but I don’t know what place he would have in my documentary about contemporary New York poetry. Please leave a comment if you can think of an answer to this dilemma.

Wheeeeee!!! and other highbrow issues

So I’ve been communicating with a madman named Bob Holman. He owns the Bowery Poetry Club. His poetry resume is insane! He first published in the late seventies, a collection of poems called Tear to Open. Of course it’s a big damn inconclusive metaphor. Every couple of pages was stuck together at the edges, so you had to rip the connection apart to read every turned page. Part of the idea is something like ‘creation is a violent act,’ although that could be misleading. Paraphrasing just can’t sum it up here. He delivered a reading of this book at the MoMA soon after it was released. Since then, his career has been such an astoundingly intense ride that I’m not going to try to bulletpoint it here. Suffice it to say that he’s won several emmy’s for poetry documentaries, written numerous books and essays alone and in collaboration with some of the brightest poets of our time, been a founding member of some of the most original poetry movements in recent history, traveled the world lecturing, and now teaches at Columbia, and I believe NYU. But he is so unconventional, in manner and in mind, that the idea of him being part of any institution seems absurd. I’ll stop singing this man’s praises, but the sheer range and eccentricity of his accomplishments are truly rare. Just check out the link when you click on his name above.

Anyway, this man is my guide into the uncommon world of contemporary NYC poetry. I was exchanging emails with him earlier tonight and I said, “Everybody is looking for the next big thing, but I feel like having this expectation is absurd.” He wrote back, “Poetry is the Last Next Thing.” As cryptic as that is, I think I know what he means, and it was close to what I was thinking. There is such a wealth of poetry going on out there, that if I set out recording it, searching deeper and further for something new, certainly the document I leave will be an interesting portrait of the way NYC poetry is today. Furthermore, and I will also illustrate this point via a conversation I had, my roommate (who was a stand up comic) said, “there all different kinds of comics. Some are college kids and they have those crowds. Then there are thirty somethings who seem like they do it to release some of life’s pressures, and they have those corresponding crowds (to paraphrase).” And that’s just it. The story isn’t about poetry – meter and verse and such – it’s about the people that make it and that follow it. All different crowds, as diverse as New York. Certainly there are some characters out there.

Thoughts, and nothing better

I’m not going to have much to show in class tomorrow. One interview and some b-roll footage is about all I can show. I will have something to post on Wednesday, but what I submit in December will be much better. I have been making connections in the NY human trafficking circuit. At least with reporters covering the subject, city officials involved, and advocacy groups. I now have tentacles spread out far and I am hoping to get real shit on camera. (Excuse the word, I could think of a suitable replacement with the same meaning.) Alot of the women that are trafficked into this country end up as prostitutes. Their johns never know that they are in any way different from any other prostitute. Often times they work in brothels, and the brothel manager never know that they are slaves. Their traffickers just seem like pimps to them. The only difference is that traffickers are pimps that take all of their money.

I told ABC today that I can no longer work 5 days a week. They were fine with this of course. They asked me to do so when I started and I wanted to make a good impression. But I need, and want, time to devote to this project. I think I am really growing into this. I have an another interview in the morning and must look over my material now.