National Poetry Month: "Punk Rock John" by Neil Hilborn

Neil Hilborn // Punk Rock John // A Poem Observed // Button Poetry

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Neil Hilborn performs "Punk Rock John" in St. Paul, Minnesota.
http://www.poetryobserved.com

Poetry Observed is committed to producing high quality videos of performance poetry, filmed off the stage. Our first series features Minnesota spoken word poets and was produced in collaboration with Button Poetry.

National Poetry Month: "Give Me A Chance" by Beau Sia

"Give Me A Chance"
By Beau Sia


if there is anyone
in the audience
in the entertainment industry
watching me perform,
I want you to keep in mind
that if you are casting any films
and need a Korean grocery store owner,
a computer expert or the random thug
of a yakuza gang,
i’m your man.
if you’re making Jackie Chan
knock-off films
and need a stunt double,
that stunt double is me.
if you need a Chinese jay-z,
a Japanese Eminem,
or a Vietnamese N'Sync,
please consider me,
because I am all those things and more.
i come from the house that
step n’ fetchit built
and i will broken English my way
to sidekick status
if that’s what’s expected of me
make an Asian different strokes.
i’ll walk around on my knees yelling,
"ahso, what you talk about wirris?!"
because it’s been 23 months and 14 days
since my art has done anything for me,
and i would be noble and toil on,
i swear i would.
live for the art and the art alone,
and all that crapass.
but college loans are monthly up my ass,
my salmon teriyaki habit is getting way out of control,
and i want some
motherfucking cable!
so you can understand where i’m coming from.
when tight verse
exhibiting dynamics
within the text
falls by the wayside
rejoice in its
pretty, packaged, boygroup,
talentless twats
sent from florida
to make me puke
but i'm not preaching. none siree, boss.
i cannot stress how ready i am
to sell out,
wear jiggy clothes,
and yell from the top of my lungs
any hook i am told to sing.
if you want the caricature
of a caricature,
then i am that caricature.
if you want an exotic dragon lady
like lucy liu,
who fucks like a kama sutra
come to life,
just tell my ass where ya want it,
and i will bend over.
if you need a voice-over artist,
just tell me
where you want the,
hi-ya's! to go
and i will be there,
because i am all that more,
i am a pop culture whore,
i an a co-sponsored world tour,
an i am
an appropriated culture at my core.
i've been noticed, acclaimed, and funny
and now all i want
is a beach front house to paint in
and a range rover
to listen to my music in,
'cause struggling fucking sucks hard
after the ninth package of ramen noodle soup.
i'm beau sia.
give me a chance,
and i'll
change the world.

Copyright © Beau Sia

Beau Sia began performing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, eventually earning himself a place on the 1996 Nuyorican National Poetry Slam team. That same year, he would be filmed for the documentary SlamNation. The film followed Sia and his Nuyorican teammates (Saul Williams, Jessica Care Moore and Mums da Schemer) as they competed at the 1996 National Poetry Slam. The team would go on to place third in the nation, and have a lasting impact on how people would view slam poetry.

Sia earned two National Poetry Slam Championships in 1997 and 2000 while competing on the NYC-Urbana national poetry slam team. He would also reach second place in the Individual Poetry Slam competition in 2001.

He wrote a parody of Jewel's work, A Night Without Armor, within four hours and published it as A Night Without Armor II: the Revenge in 1998. He wrote different poems with Jewel's original titles, lampooning her earnest lines. It is painfully detailed in its satire, changing the delicate paintings printed in Jewel's book to rough, humorous pencil drawings by Sia. The front and back cover were also painstakingly mirrored.

National Poetry Month: "Seven Confessions on Cheating" by Dylan Garity

Dylan Garity // Seven Confessions on Cheating // A Poem Observed // Button Poetry

Button Poetry on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ButtonPoetry?ref=hl

Dylan Garity performs Seven Confessions on Cheating in Northfield, Minnesota.
http://www.poetryobserved.com

Poetry Observed is committed to producing high quality videos of performance poetry, filmed off the stage. Our first series features Minnesota spoken word poets and was produced in collaboration with Button Poetry.

Like slam poetry? Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective.

National Poetry Month: "Night Bound" by Marc Smith

"Night Bound" by Marc Smith, performed at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago in 1993.

Marc Smith (So What!) is best known for bringing to the worldwide poetry community a new style of poetic presentation that has spawned one the most important social/literary arts movements of our time. As stated in the PBS television series, The United States of Poetry, a “strand of new poetry began at Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern in 1987 when Marc Smith found a home for the Poetry Slam.” Since then, performance poetry has spread throughout the country and across the globe to hundreds of cities, universities, high schools, festivals, and cultural centers. Each year, teams from American and European cities compete in National Poetry Slams, extravagant homespun festivals blending thousands of poetic voices. The Slam has taken root and is flourishing in Australia, Germany, UK, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Madagascar, Singapore, and even at the South Pole.


Born on the southeast side of Chicago, Smith’s innate sense of rhythm and unflinching realism has made him one of the country’s most compelling performers. Full of grit, his performances break poetic boundaries, giving audiences an acute vision of what poetry is and what it can be. Smith has performed at The Smithsonian Institute, The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago Museum of Contemporary, the Asheville Poetry Festival (North Carolina), 1st Night Annapolis (Maryland), The Innovator’s Festival (Washington, DC), the Kennedy Center, Galway’s Cruit Festival, Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, Ausburg’s ABC Brecht Festival, and the Queensland Poetry Fest in Australia. He has been featured on CNN, 60 Minutes, National Public Radio’s Whadda Ya Know, ARTbeat Chicago, Ophra, Wild Chicago, WGN Chicago’s Very Own, Chicago Slices and has been a many time member of NewCity’s Lit 50, a listing of the top fifty movers and shakers in Chicago literature.


Smith’s book, Crowdpleaser, celebrates the Green Mill, particularly its audiences who remain at the core of the Slam’s success. Illustrated by Michael Acerra, Crowdpleaser, is a remarkable document, sensitively chronicled by original poems and anecdotes. As with the Slam, the book defies labels and explores new forms. It has been credited by the Chicago Book Review, The Chicago Sun Times, The Chicago Tribune, Illinois Entertainer, New City and The Reader.


Smith’s poetry has been featured in Hammer’s Magazine, Chicago Magazine, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Poetry Slam, an anthology, Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which won the 1994 American Book Award, and The United States of Poetry, a publication that accompanied the PBS television series. His work has been cited by The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun Times. Selection of his work can also be heard on CDs: By Someone’s Good Grace, a recording of the first National Slam Team Champions (1990), Grand Slam: The 1995 National Slam, It’s About Time (1999), and Quarters in the Juke Box (2007).


In recent years Marc collaborated with editor Mark Eleveld to create Sourcebooks’s Spoken Word Revolution and Spoken Word Revolution Redux, poetry anthologies covering the performance poetry scene at the top of the best-selling list. The CDs included in both these books (and narrated by Marc) are found in the collections of young poets and educators around the world. Marc’s Bible of Slam The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry released by Alpha/Penguin to national and international audiences is used as a blueprint for creating slams and learning the ins and outs of performance poetry.

Chalking up more than 1000 performances at the Green Mill, Smith continues to host and perform at the Uptown Poetry Slam, now in its 21st year, to standing room only houses. He has staged a multitude of special slam productions including The Neutral Turf Poetry Festival at Navy Pier—Chicago, Slam Dunk Poetry Day at Chicago’s Field Museum, which had people hanging over the balconies to see the action, and The Summer Solstice Poetry Show at the MCA, which crowded people cross-legged into the aisles.


Moving his talents forward into an even more dramatic realms, he has written and produced two stage plays: Flea Market, a night of monologues, and A House Party For Henry, an interactive play, and co-wrote, produced, and performed in the Zeitgeist Theater’s The Psychic Café. He is on the Artistic Board of several Chicago based performing arts companies and has just recently debut his highly acclaimed Sandburg to Smith, a musical adaptation of Carl Sandburg’s poems and stories performed in concert with the Rootabaga Band.

Like slam poetry? Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective.

The tail gunner position in the Executive Sweet, a B-25B Mitchell bomber,

A view from the tail gunner position in the Executive Sweet, a B-25B Mitchell bomber, over the Verde Valley, west of Sedona, Arizona, coming into a landing from the Sedona Airport on March 30, 2013.

A view to starboard from the nose.

 Two passengers, one of whom was a WWII veteran pilot, the other a Vietnam veteran. A crew member in standing behind them. The plane is only a few feet wide.

The nose guns.

The crawlspace to the nose.

The midship crawlspace. The bomb bay is beneath it.

The passageway to the tailgunner.

The tailgunner's controls.

The tailgunner's view of Sedona

Pilot John Garlinger and two of my fellow passengers.

The tail

Starboard wing

A squadron of T-34 Mentor trainers flying in formation to land at the airport.

A view in flight out the side window of the Executive Sweet, a B-25 Mitchell bomber

The view inside and out of the starboard porthole of the Executive Sweet, a B-25B Mitchell bomber, over the Verde Valley, west of Sedona, Arizona, in a flight from the Sedona Airport on March 30, 2013.

The nose turret of the Executive Sweet, a B-25 Mitchell bomber above Sedona

The nose turret of the Executive Sweet, a B-25B Mitchell bomber, over the Village of Oak Creek, Arizona, shortly after takeoff from the Sedona Airport on March 30, 2013.

Takeoff aboard a B-25 bomber

Takeoff aboard the Executive Sweet, a B-25B Mitchell bomber, from the Sedona Airport on March 30, 2013.

National Poetry Month: "Flatland" by Sam Cook

Sam Cook // Flatland // A Poem Observed // Button Poetry

Purchase this audio track at The Button Store: http://store.buttonpoetry.com/track/flatland
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Sam Cook performs Flatland in Northfield, Minnesota.
http://www.poetryobserved.com

Poetry Observed is committed to producing high quality videos of performance poetry, off the stage. Our first series features Twin Cities based poets and was produced in collaboration with Button Poetry.

Like slam poetry? Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective.

Aboard a B-25B "Mtichell" bomber

The Executive Sweet, a 1944-built B-25B "Mitchell" bomber that flew into Sedona on Saturday, March 30.

The nose gunner position, a few thousand feet about the Village of Oak Creek. And yes, I played with the guns.

The tailgunner position.

The top turrent position.

Photo by Al Comello

Aboard the Exective Sweet, about ready to climb into the nose, accomplished by climbing belly first through the tunnel beneath the pilots.

National Poetry Month: "Full House" by Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks performs a spoken-word poem about the 1990s sitcom "Full House."

Like slam poetry? Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective.

National Poetry Month: "Shelters" by Michael Lee

Michael Lee // Shelters // A Poem Observed // Button Poetry

Michael on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MichaelLeeWritesButton Poetry on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ButtonPoetry?ref=hl
Michael Lee performs Shelters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
http://www.poetryobserved.com

Poetry Observed is committed to producing high quality videos of performance poetry, off the stage. Our first series features Twin Cities based poets and was produced in collaboration with Button Poetry.

Like slam poetry? Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective.

National Poetry Month: "Coded Language" by Saul Williams

Coded Language

by Saul Williams

 
Whereas breakbeats have been the missing link
Connecting the diasporic community to its drum-woven past

Whereas the quantized drum has allowed the whirling
Mathematicians to calculate the ever changing distance
Between rock and stardom

Whereas the velocity of the spinning vinyl
Cross-faded, spun backwards and re-released
At the same given moment of recorded history
Yet at a different moment in times continuum
Has allowed history, to catch up with the present

We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing
Standards of dialog, statements such as "Keep it real"
Especially when punctuating or anticipating modes
Of ultraviolence inflicted psychologically or physically or depicting
An unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active
And not representative of the individually determined is

Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness
Of this state of being and the lessened distance
Between thought patterns and their secular manifestations
The role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased by a number
No less than 70 percent of the current enlisted as vocal aggressors

Motherfuckers better realize now is the time to self-actualize
We have found evidence that hip-hop's standard 85 rpm
When increased by a number as least half the rate of its standard
Or decreased at three quarters of its speed
May be a determining factor in heightening consciousness

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face
Of the unchanging the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth
Equate rhyme with reason, sun with season, our cyclical relationship
To phenomenon has encouraged scholars
To erase the centers of periods thus symbolizing the non-linear
Character of 'cause and effect reject mediocrity

Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that
Which as been given for you to understand
The current standard is the equivalent
Of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant
The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional
And deformative symptoms and could not properly mature
On a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears

Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness
The role of darkness is not to be seen as or equated with ignorance
But with the unknown and the mysteries of the unseen
Thus, in the name of
Robeson, God's Son, Hurston, Ahkenaton
Hatsheput, Blackfoot, Helen, Lennon, Kahlo
Kali, The Three Marias, Tara, Lilith, Lorde
Whitman, Baldwin, Ginsberg, Kaufman, Lumumba

Ghandi, Gibran, Shabazz, Shabazz, Siddhartha
Medusa, Guevara, Gurdjieff, Rand, Wright, Banneker
Tubman, Hamer, Holiday, Davis, Coltrane
Morrison, Joplin, Du Bois, Clarke, Shakespeare

Rachmaninov, Ellington, Carter, Gaye, Hathaway
Hendrix, Kuti, Dickerson, Riperton, Mary, Isis
Teresa, Hansberry, Tesla, Plath, Rumi, Fellini
Michaux, Nostradamus, Nefertiti, La Rock, Shiva

Ganesha, Yemaja, Oshun, Obatala, Ogun, Kennedy
King, four little girls, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Keller
Biko, Perón, Marley, Magdalene, Cosby, Shakur
Those who burnt, those still aflamed and the countless unnamed

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us
We are determining the future at this very moment
We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone

Our music is our alchemy, we stand as the manifested
Equivalent of three buckets of water and a hand full of minerals
Thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down
Supply the percussion factor of forever, if you must count
To keep the beat then count

Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious
Curve you circles counterclockwise, use your cipher to decipher
Coded Language, manmade laws, climb waterfalls and trees
Commune with nature, snakes and bees let your children
Name themselves and claim themselves as the new day, for today

We are determined to be the channelers of these changing
Frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama
Photography, carpentry, crafts, love and love, we enlist every instrument
Acoustic, electronic every so called race, gender and sexual preference
Every person as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility
To uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking world

Any utterance unaimed will be disclaimed
Will be named Two Rappers Slain
Any utterance unaimed will be disclaimed
Will be named Two Rappers Slain

Copyright © Saul Williams

A leading voice on the spoken-word scene, Saul Williams began astonishing open mic audiences with his impassioned tongue-twisting verse in the mid-1990s and eventually became a grand slam champion at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. 

In 1996, he led the four-person New York team to the finals of the National Poetry Slam competition, a fierce battle of verse that was chronicled in the documentary film "Slamnation." Two years later, in a role that featured many of his own compositions, Williams played an imprisoned street poet in the award-winning film, Slam, for which Esquire magazine deemed him a "dreadlocked dervish of words."

A self-proclaimed disciple of Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka, Williams combines the rhythms and themes of Beat and Black Arts poets in his work. His three collections of poetry--The Seventh Octave, Sãhe, and , said the shotgun to the head--tackle difficult social and political issues as well as intangible questions about religion and spirituality. In performance, his work is full of a pulsing frenzy, which the New York Times described as "mind-twisting cosmic rumination with hallucinatory science-fiction scenarios that the poet delivers with an incantatory fervor."

The undeniable beat in the poet's work led to an inevitable transition to music. Initially, he collaborated with DJs and hip-hop artists, reciting his verse to their backbeat. In 2001, he recorded his own album, Amethyst Rock Star, co-produced by Rick Rubin, the legendary producer of Public Enemy, Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as the co-founder of the record label Def Jam with hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons. In 2004, Williams released the self-titled album Saul Williams, for which, as he explained, he approached the music as a musician, not as a spoken-word artist. "The last [album] was about poetry over beats," he said in a recent interview, "and this is about the songs."

Despite his shift toward songwriting, the words are still of utmost importance to Williams. Demonstrating a political consciousness through his poems and songs is vital. He feels the current hip-hop culture has departed from the thought-provoking work of such artists as Public Enemy and De La Soul to a more inane preoccupation with materialism and a dangerous tolerance of what he calls "bullshit lyricism." He warns against the dangerous and passive acceptance of these negative lyrics transmitted through an infectious beat: "You start building a tolerance," he explained. "Because when you nod your head to a beat, you nod your head affirmatively."

On his own records, Williams has managed to marry hip-hop beats with sober lyrics. "Amethyst Rock Star has to do with the fact that when you're tuned into your spirit you realize that we are all stars by birth," the poet has said. "That's our birthright, literally." The band accompanying him is comprised of a violinist, a cellist, a bass player, a keyboard player, a DJ, and a drummer, resulting in an album that the Times of London named "Album of the Year."

The album Saul Williams was influenced by a wide range of artists including Jimmy Hendrix, Radiohead, and the Mars Volta, and resulted in a fusion that Williams calls "industrial punk hop." Brian Orloff, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, explained: "Musically, Saul Williams matches Williams's lyrics with gritty, frittered guitar and urgent rhythms. 'List of Demands (Reparations)' finds Williams singing, "I gotta list of demands written on the palm of my hands' over a staccato guitar riff that sounds like gunfire.'"

"I'm definitely a hip-hop head by nature," Williams has said. "I'm there in the mix, so I'm turned on by the same things, nod my head to the same things. Even if I'm writing a piece of prose, there is still an intrinsic rhythm that I'm looking for, even without rhyme, even without beats, even without music and microphones." 

Like slam poetry?

Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective open to all.

National Poetry Month: "Thank You Thank You" by Donald Hall from The New Yorker

Thank You Thank You

from The New Yorker

By Donald Hall

April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2012, there were seven thousand four hundred and twenty-seven poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing; in April of 1948, there were fifteen readings in the United States, twelve by Robert Frost.

So I claim. The figures are imaginary but you get the point.
***

Whenever a poet comes to the end of a poetry reading, she pauses a moment, then, as a signal for applause, says, “Thank you,” and nods her head. Hands clap, and she says, “Thank you,” again, to more applause. Sometimes she says it one more time, or he does. How else does the audience know that the reading might not go on for six hours?

***

For better or worse, poetry is my life. After a reading, I enjoy the question period. On a tour in Nebraska I read poems to high-school kids, a big auditorium. When I finished, someone wanted to know how I got started. I said that at twelve I loved horror movies, then read Edgar Allan Poe, then… A young man up front waved his hand. I paused in my story. He asked, “Didn’t you do it to pick up chicks?”

I remembered cheerleaders at Hamden High School. “It works better,” I told him, “when you get older.”
***

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road. He spoke well, his metre accommodating his natural sentences, and in between poems he made people laugh. At times, he played the chicken farmer, cute and countrified, eliciting coos of delight from an adoring audience. Once I heard him do this routine, then attended the post-reading cocktail party where he ate deviled eggs, sipped martinis, and slaughtered the reputations of Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore…

Back then, other famous poets read aloud only two or three times a year. If they were alive now, probably they could make a better living saying their poems than they did as an editor at Faber and Faber, or an obstetrician, or an insurance-company executive, or a Brooklyn librarian.
***

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. The London Times remarked on my “appropriately lugubrious voice.” When I first did a full-length poetry reading, three years later, my arms plunged stiff from my shoulders, my voice was changeless in pitch and volume, my face rigid, expressionless, pale—as if I were a collaborator facing a firing squad.
***

A question period for undergraduates at a Florida college began with the usual stuff: What is the difference between poetry and prose? Then I heard a question I had never heard before: “How do you reconcile being a poet with being president of Hallmark cards?” This inquisitive student had looked on the Internet, and learned that the man who runs that sentiment factory is indeed Donald Hall.

It’s a common name. Once before a reading a man asked me, “Are you Donald Hall?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So am I,” he said.
***

When my first book came out, in 1955, it was praised. I did a second book, my poems appeared in magazines—but nobody asked me to speak them out loud. I taught at the University of Michigan, which sponsored no readings. To my students, I recited great poems with gusto and growing confidence—Wyatt, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Hardy—and worked on performance without knowing it. It was a shock when, late in the decade, a lecture agent telephoned to offer a fee for reading my poems at a college. It happened again, and I flew off on days when I didn’t teach. Michigan paid minimal salaries, and most teachers amplified their incomes by plodding to summer school. I stayed home and wrote instead of employing the Socratic method in a suffocating classroom.

As the phone kept ringing, I supposed that poetry readings were some sort of fad, like cramming into phone booths; I would enjoy it as long as it lasted.
***

When my generation learned to read aloud, publishing from platforms more often than in print, we heard our poems change. Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning sound was imagined through the eye. Gradually the mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performance. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that “form is never more than an extension of content.” Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is “Paradise Lost.”

In concentrating on sound, as in anything else, there are things to beware of. Revising a poem one morning, I found myself knowing that a new phrase was repellent, but realized it would pass if I intoned it out loud. Watch out. A poem must work from the platform but it must also work on the page. My generation started when poetry was print, before it became sound. We were lucky to practice both modes at once.
***

A chairman of English warned a friend of mine about her approaching audience. “They’re required to attend,” he said. “They don’t listen to anything. Sometimes in class I ask them to open a window, or to close it, just to see if they’re alive.” He sighed a deep sigh, as ponderous as tenure. “I don’t know what I’d do if The New Yorker didn’t come on Thursdays.”
***

It’s alleged that Homer said his poems aloud, though perhaps it was more like improv over centuries. Somewhat later, we learn, Tennyson read his poems to Queen Victoria, but we don’t know much more. In the nineteen-thirties, William Butler Yeats travelled by train from east coast to west, but the master of poetic noise didn’t speak his verses. At universities, to butter his bread, he read the typescript of a lecture called “Three Great Irishmen.” Maybe poets used to be paid not to say their poems?
***

By chance, I had been an undergraduate at the one college in America with an endowed meagre series of poetry readings. Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferable—superb poems spoken as if they were lines from the telephone book. William Carlos Williams read too quickly in a high-pitched voice, but seemed to enjoy himself. Wallace Stevens appeared to loathe his beautiful work, making it flat and half-audible. (Maybe he thought of how the boys in the office would tease him.) Marianne Moore’s tuneless drone was as eccentric as her inimitable art. When she spoke between poems, she mumbled in the identical monotone. Since she frequently revised or cut her things, a listener had to concentrate, to distinguish poems from talk. After twenty minutes, she looked distressed, and said, “Thank you.” When Dylan Thomas read, I hovered above my auditorium seat as I heard him say Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” He read his own poems afterward, fabricated for his rich and succulent Welsh organ. I found myself floating again. In four American visits, from 1950 to 1954, when he died in New York, Thomas read his poems many times at many places, from New York’s Poetry Center through dozens of western colleges. Frost’s eminence among poetry readers disappeared for a time.
***

In a question period I launched into my familiar rant about dead metaphors, asserting that when “I am glued to the chair” equals “I am anchored to the spot,” we claim that a tugboat is Elmer’s glue. This afternoon, I was obsessed with dead metaphors of disability: the crippled economy, blind ambition, deaf to entreaties, the paralysis of industry, and…

At the end I summed up my argument. Guileless, I said, “All these metaphors are lame.”

Why was everyone laughing?
***

Late in the fifties, poetry readings erupted in the United States suddenly and numerously. Probably it was because of Dylan Thomas’s readings, though there was a gap before the volcano exploded. His popularity was not only on account of his voice or his verse. Thomas was a star, and most people came to his readings because of the Tales of Master Dylan—vast drunkenness, creative obscenity at parties, botched seductions, nightly comas—but if people attended because of his celebrity, at least they were going to a poetry reading. Maybe the explosion of readings was also because of a cultural change. Songs were no longer Tin Pan Alley, and the lyrics were worth heeding. When everyone listened to Bob Dylan, they heard lines that resembled poetry. When people heard memorable language sung from platforms, they became able to hear poems recited in auditoriums. The University of Michigan began to schedule poetry readings every Tuesday at 4 P.M. A gathering of students, sometimes three hundred, attended each week, and absorbed what they listened to. A few days after one reading, I met Sarah, a friend of my daughter’s. She recited a stanza from Tuesday’s poet. “You’ve been reading her books!” I said. “Oh, no,” she said. Sarah remembered the words.
***

Once, after a circuit reading, my driver left me at a house for a party. I would spend the night there, while he went to a motel to get some sleep, and he would pick me up the next morning at six. The party was good; the party was long. These were the days when people drank liquor. Our host drooped asleep on the sofa at 4 A.M., which was apparently his daily wont. I didn’t notice, because I was flirting with a pretty woman, whose husband stood dazed beside her, until he emerged into consciousness to attack me. His fist aimed at my jaw, but moved so slowly that I was able to duck. Three minutes later, we became friends forever, and at 6 A.M. I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for my escort to drive me to the next reading, the next party.
***

Poets love to tell stories about readings. After a woman friend performed in Mississippi one winter, a man handed her a heavy box of typewriter paper, saying, “I want to share my poems with you.” When she glanced through “Verses of a Sergeant Major, Ret.,” she found it unreadable. Telling me about it, she asserted that share has become a verb of assault disguised as magnanimity. “Unless you read my poems, I will gouge your eyeballs out.”
***

Bert Hornback ran the Tuesday readings in Ann Arbor, supplementing the English department’s pittance by appealing to university administrators for discretionary funds. After ten years of weekly readings, he burned out, and watched as the feckless department drooped to holding a reading a year. He decided to see what he could do by himself. On a January day in the eighties, he borrowed the university’s Rackham Auditorium, sold tickets for a joint poetry reading—five-fifty each, fifty cents for Ticketmaster—and invited some friends to do a joint reading: Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, and Seamus Heaney. On a Friday night—against a basketball home game, against the Chicago Symphony—Bert filled eleven hundred seats with paying poetry fans. The Fire Department permitted a hundred standing-room-only tickets, which sold out, and Bert added further S.R.O.s when the Fire Department wasn’t looking. Unexpected vanloads arrived from Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Each poet read for forty minutes, and after a break did ten minutes more. Outside, the crowd without tickets sulked and grumbled. It was said that scalpers charged as much as fifty dollars.
***

A Dodge festival in New Jersey was massive with poets, schoolteachers, and school kids. Each poet did panels, question periods, and readings. The first night, all twenty-five poets read, a few minutes each, to a crowd of three thousand. Nobody sitting at the back of the tent could have seen a poet’s face if the festival had not enlarged each visage on a screen like the Dallas Cowboys’. For closeups, the Dodge employed a black, jointed steel arm, a foot thick and fifty feet long, which curled and lurched its camera back and forth, grabbing each facial detail in its metallic tentacles. It looked as if it were searching for a source of protein.

A week after the readings and lectures of the festival, a recent Pulitzer poet received a thick letter from a woman in South Carolina who had fallen in love. The envelope was heavy with amorous poems, and she told him that there were ninety-five more, but she didn’t have the stamps. She attached a photograph of a mature woman in front of a ranch house, and implored him to fly down immediately. She sent an airline ticket with blank dates.
***

It’s O.K. to be pleased when an audience loves you, or treat you as deathless, but you must not believe them. If a poet is any good, how would the listeners know? Poets have no notion of their own durability or distinction. When poets announce that their poems are immortal, they are depressed or lying or psychotic. Interviewing T. S. Eliot, I saved my cheekiest question for last. “Do you know if you’re any good?” His revised and printed response was formal, but in person he was abrupt: “Heavens no! Do you? Nobody intelligent knows if he’s any good.” No honor, no publication proves anything. Look at an issue of the Atlantic in 1906; look at a Poetry from 1931. A Nobel Prize means nothing. Look in an almanac at the list of poets who have won a Pulitzer Prize; look at the sad parade of Poets Laureate.
***

Sometimes an audience is not three thousand. A friend of mine arrived at a hall to find that his listener was singular. They went out for a beer. I heard of another poet who showed up for a crowd of two. Gamefully, she did a full reading from the podium, and afterward descended to shake the hands of her crowd. One was dead.
***

When I was young, I could project, and now without a microphone I can’t be heard in the tenth row. It’s not only the debility of age. One’s range is diminished by habitual use of microphones. (When stage actors spend twenty years making movies, they are inaudible when they return to Broadway or the West End.) But there are advantages to artificial enhancement. There’s a poem in which I moo like a cow. Cows’ lungs are bigger than ours. I approach the microphone intimately, and softly but audibly moo as long as a cow moos. Proximity to the microphone saves my wind as I croon, mm-mmm-mmmmm-mmmmmmmm-ugghwanchhh. My friends say it’s the best line I’ve ever written.
***

After the group-talk of the question period comes the one-on-one. People line up for signatures. Sometimes the seeker dictates a dedication. “Say, ‘With love to Billy and his adorable wife, Sheila, who makes a great pound cake.’ ” The signer should demur, or at least edit. Everyone in line must spell a name, or “Felicia” turns out to be “Phylysha.” (Once, at a prep school, a boy asked me to write, “For Mom and Dad.” I told him my parents were dead, and we worked things out.) If there are just a few in line, the poet can speak with them as if they were people. If the line is long, it becomes impossible to distinguish one petitioner from another. At the end stands the host—the man who invited the poet to the campus, who picked her up at the airport, with whom she had lengthy conversation, who will give her the check, who hands her a book to sign—and she has no idea of his name.
***

Some readings prove memorable for a single eccentricity. On an occasion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an orchestra was finishing rehearsal in the auditorium as the poetry reading was due to begin. The introducer and the poet carried music stands into the wings. In London, a reading was to begin at 6 P.M. in the ancient Church of St. Giles in the Fields. Evensong prevailed. Another time, in the state of Chiapas, in Mexico, eight writers sat onstage waiting hours for the governor to arrive. A large audience had departed by the time he walked in, surrounded by bodyguards with machine guns. In fatigue, we each read to the governor for five minutes. “Gracias,” we said. “Gracias.”
***

As I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did. Performance held up, but not body; I had to read sitting down. When an introduction slogged to its end, I lurched from backstage, hobbled, and carefully aimed my ass into a chair. For a while, I began each reading with a short poem I was trying out, which spoke of being twelve and watching my grandfather milk his Holsteins. In the poem I asked, in effect, how my grandfather would respond if he saw me now. When I finished saying the poem, there was always a grave pause, long enough to drive a hayrack through, followed by a standing ovation. I had never received a standing O after a first poem; now it happened again and again, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota to California, and I thought I had written an uncannily moving poem. When I mailed copies to friends for praise, they politely expressed their dismay. I was puzzled and distressed until I finally figured it out. The audience had just seen me stagger, wavering with a cane, and labor to sit down, wheezing. They imagined my grandfather horrified, seeing a cadaver gifted with speech. They stood and applauded because they knew they would never see me again.

Donald Hall published his final book of poems, “The Back Chamber,” last autumn. This November, he will publish “Christmas at Eagle Pond,” about New Hampshire in 1940. He may be reached via e-mail.

Like poetry? Support "Holy Spoken Word," Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 gets us closer to our goal of our first publication and establishment of a nonprofit spoken word collective.

What does Necessary Poetry want to do?

Help support us on Kickstarter. Donate to help us publish Holy Spoken Word - Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology: A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 would do wonders to get us to our goal.

 The poets are some of the best in Northern Arizona:

Visit Kickstarter and support "Holy Spoken Word" - Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology

"Holy Spoken Word" is Necessary Poetry's 1st Anthology:

A multimedia anthology, showcasing the amazing writing, artwork, and spoken-word performance of the Necessary Poetry collective, a group of poets from Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott.

Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter. A donation of even $10 or $20 would do wonders to get us to our goal.

Necessary Poetry is the collaborative effort of over 15 Arizona slam poets.

Sparked by a common love for written and spoken word, and a collective desire to inspire and motivate positive creative expression, we've joined together to publish a multi-media anthology of our best individual and cooperative creations - Holy Spoken Word. We are a passionate band of dedicated volunteers, and this stunning collection of words, artwork, and recorded performances is sure to seduce minds and ignite hearts everywhere.
BUT, POETRY IS BORING. Not this poetry! This poetry is raw. This poetry is relentless. This poetry captures smiles - it takes mouths hostage.

The poets are some of the best in Northern Arizona:

FAQ

• Is this a religious anthology?
  Words are our religion... so in a way, yes. But in the way you probably meant it - um, no.
  The poetry submitted to Necessary Poetry may have religious themes or imagery from various traditions, but the project as a whole is secular and nonreligious. While some of the poets themselves may be religious or spiritual, others are secular, agnostic and atheist. The title "Holy Spoken Word" stems from the poets' belief that if anything is "holy," then surely it must be poetry and its power to connect peoples across time, languages, cultures, religious and spiritual or nonspiritual traditions.
  
• WHY poetry?
  Because everything is poetry. The way the rain falls, the way the light bounces off a glass, the way you cried hard when your first love dumped you because your freckles freaked him or her out... Inspiration can be found anywhere, and we're passionate about presenting ours in a way which connects us all on a human level. 
  
• What happens when you sell a gazillion copies of the book? Will you sit back to revel in your riches?
  Hell, no!  Necessary Poetry's contributors have all agreed that any monies received from the sale of this anthology will be used to fund a series of workshops on writing and expression, and to support the efforts of aspiring poets and spoken word performers in our community.
  The hardworking poets hope to use those resources to fund workshops and efforts to bring poetry to a wider audience and encourage those who want to want to speak to find the poet and Holy Spoken Word within themselves, whatever that may be.
  
  

  Click here to help support our efforts on Kickstarter.