One to the Gut

So I spent the day in a poetry class in a public high-school in Brooklyn recording for my master's project. Afterwards the teacher began talking about teaching as a performance: teachers have roles, just like actors, and classes have a plots. The conflict comes from whatever it is you are trying to impart that day, and the fact that the students don't know any of it walking in.

So performance is not about an act as much as it is about communicating. The "performance" is the extra punch you need to transmit your message outside yourself, and make it stick. And there is a performative element in poetry. Sometimes you can understand a poem better hearing it read than you can reading it. You'rin the room with someone else hearing them read, and you just feel something. Here's what Eric wrote about a poetry reading he attended: (Oh, for those of you who don't know Eric, or his style, it's not totally linear, it's like a wave, just go with it and you'll get to the beach):

i was sitting on the floor and as soon as she began the poems i was on the floor often not breathing my face not-knowing in finally hearing knowing the rush of it that suddenly there are new leaps being made--the other side of the song of innocence, which is not the song of experience, suddenly, it feels--it is--what has not been said--which is beginning slowly as the light backs it to begin--the other side of the mountain--following your and ashbery's distinct leaps and continuing looking for what you can give so that thinking is different so that it was an event the event i do not when i heard it when the image occurred at a poetry reading other than yours to this extent (like the shot of brigitte bardot in contempt in the car at night--the stillness in that shot--wide-angle--the wide-angle he opened in the wind for us so that we might slight ourselves to enter and love--and to be slighted by the rocks--sitting--the car past eliot's throbbing it is exhausted the throbbing and we are in the new coolness it is the ethics of certain beauties--a certain blue light, if i could show you--almost giotto's but less knowing? piero's flagellation? in front of which last winter in urbino, the palace, a young girl with incredibly longingly beautiful gold--dark--and the day in the casements--that light in her--image without shadow--she could have said--but she stood and looked at the flagellation (and that he is put to the back--and his eyes gone--and the leader with his hand slack and leaning--how the entire painting is in the hands, everyone's hands, chris showed me--he was there--is always there--makes the there there--but even more the stairs--the white stairs behind--leading up to what--the white stairs--what we never see in endgame-- ) and in contempt, in the car, camille--night something we are made to feel outside--something on the outside--which makes it exist--and in the flow the almost yellowing i meant to write yellow again i meant to write yelling flow in the damp effulgences as in macbeth what comes back is not night--tomorrow--this is all--i'm sorry--this is all about her--about this reading--it was the first human, maybe not even human too, (and the leaves are trusting themselves--i look down at them) presentness--the first being present--like the white stairs--and not-knowing and not being able to breathe--and celan writing in romanian "we'll go back upstairs to drown ourselves" and when she would look up--as you look up--at us--sometimes--i felt here we are--there was no time to feel so i felt here--or it is not we are it is--here it is--i hold it toward you--or seals--human so human on an island--on the rocks--in the water--all eyes cavernous--and who are you looking at--the stars are already out--gone in each wave

The point is a great reading of a poem should, at times, feel like a punch in the gut. It should bypass all your analytical functions and make you feel something. Eventually, of course, you analyze, but at for a moment you are just left sputtering, and coughing up memories, and literary references like blood. Visual images are very good at this kind of punching, that's what makes paintings and movies so effective. But poems, though they may have images, don't have a lot of visuals. Performance is the closest a poem gets. So if you get a chance to read a poem out-loud, make it count.