Well, it’s about time this one made it: my old reliable signature poem, “Mission Statement,” has been recorded for an upcoming project (more on that as I know more) and I figured I’d toss a version of it up on the Myspace page.

It’s a tad rough — the recording’s fine but I glitched a couple of lines which, to be honest, is part of the point of this project. (Again, more on that as I know more.) Still, for those of you who know the poem, it’s there for your enjoyment and I hope others who don’t know the poem find it enjoyable.

http://www.myspace.com/poetrybytonybrown

(You can check out my previous post for the beginning of this discussion: http://radioactiveart.livejournal.com/721940.html )

More on the phenomenon of “performance as obstacle to the poem.”

What I’m seeing — and I’ve seen enough examples by now to feel like I’m onto something with this — is that there is a certain category of performer in slam that I’m going to call, for want of a better term, “The Embodiment of the Voice Of God.” (Bad name, and no offense meant to Nick Fox, but I digress.)

The Voice Of God requires two things:

— passionate conviction that the poem being delivered is important to the audience in some way as personal testimony, humorous insight, or social comment;
— an attempt to bedazzle or enchant the listeners with arresting images and/or brilliant wordplay.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. God knows I’ve written poems I perform this way, although I write far fewer of them as I get older and I don’t think they ever made up the bulk of my repertoire of work. (Chime in if you disagree; I’m open to that.) I don’t think it’s really about yelling or not yelling; it’s about the delivery of the poem being so emphatic, so aggressively sure of itself, that it leaves little room for rumination on the actual messages and/or processes of the poem.

The problem I have with the Voice Of God is pretty simple: I see it as applicable and effective in far fewer cases than where it is currently used.

My insight on this came from reading a bunch of poems in a bunch of chapbooks — poems I’d seen in performance. When I went back and looked at the poems in question, I was struck by how often there was a disconnect between the emotional content of the poem and the way I’d seen it delivered. Often, commas and other punctuation made sense in the text of the poem but were discarded or only handled perfunctorily in the performance of the poem. So many times I saw that a poem I’d seen done as a loud, aggressive, quick-off-the- tongue piece of work was in truth something that had a far greater range of emotional dynamics to it than you’d identify if you only heard the poem, and that the written version of the poem was far better than the performance would suggest.

It’s a paradox to me — the idea that people would be willing to detract from their poem by not seeing how a more nuanced reading of it might be more appropriate.

I then realized something that I think is important: the truth is, many of these poems would be better rendered in three and a half or four minutes than in the three minute window that seems to be the default for a lot of slammers whether or not they use those poems in slams. That slavish devotion to time compression seems to increase the signal to noise ratio in such a way that nuances are cast aside. If you can’t slow down, if you can’t decrease your cadences and rhythms to match the written poem, if you can’t take the time to whisper now and again because you can’t afford to take yourself over the time limit (even if you’re not slamming), AND the nuances are there to be seen on the page, you’re crippling the maximum impact of the poem.

Again, there’s far more to say on this and it needs to be refined, but that’s enough for now. I’ll come back to it again in the next few days…

Thoughts?

that I need to research more, but I’m starting to feel like the largest problem with the poetry in slams these days is less about the writing (which I know I’ve bitched about for years) and more about the performance.

Basically, I’ve been reading and re-reading a bunch of chapbooks from the last few years and finding the writing is better than I remembered, but when I compare the nuances and dynamics of the poems to the way they’re usually delivered, I find a huge gap in the translation of the printed word to the stage.

This also seems to be a mostly male-centered thing, although I’ve found a few examples by women.

I’m also finding my perception that the well-regarded female poets in the slam world are generally (to me) light years ahead of the well-regarded male poets in terms of both writing and performance is still justified, with very few exceptions. And I’m trying to objectify my own subjective view that for some reason, the male poets get greater acclaim for lesser work. But that’s still uncertain.

Thoughts welcome.

IMPORTANT ETA: Let me be clear on this: I think the problem is not in a lack of performance skills; in fact, I think the real problem is that there is way too much emphasis on PERFORMING the poems in a particular way and far less than is needed on taking the time to translate the poem on the page into a performance that matches its dynamics.