Blog #15

Amanda Bowker-Paster

April 1, 2014

Short Analysis Rough Draft

Poems are often viewed as very confusing pieces of literature. Readers of poetry are taught to analyze every nook and cranny of the poem at hand to find the true meaning of the poem. Often times this makes the poem even more confusing and a lot less meaningful. It is difficult to understand and relate to a poem in print because readers are told that there is a specific meaning to the poem, but cannot always decipher what that meaning is. A newer form of poetry, known as performance poetry, is becoming increasingly more popular. This type of poetry involves memorizing a piece of poetry by heart and performing the poem for audience members. Through an interview between interviewer A and interviewee S, it is evident that audiences in today's society can better relate to and are especially impacted by performance poetry as opposed to reading poetry in print.

To start, the interviewee, S, became interested in performing her poetry when she was inspired by seeing another poet recite his work by memory.

A asked S, “So um how did you like transition just from writing poetry to the performance pieces that you do?”

S responded by saying, “um I heard um Phillip Dacey D-A-C-E-Y um read his poetry by heart at the Passaic County Community College poetry center and I was so enamored of that and so um in 2007 I decided that I really need to um have more of my poetry published and um I would like to start readings. I mean I wrote a lot of poetry and I wasn't really out there.”

Earlier in the interview S stated that she had been writing poetry for 63 years. So that means that S was writing poetry in print for about 56 years before she became interested in learning her poetry by heart and performing her pieces. She decided on doing this because she, herself, was an audience member during another poet's performance. All of the reading and writing of poetry that S had done in previous years had not impacted or inspired her enough to want to begin readings. While the readings she did and the poets who inspired her through their print poetry did inspire her to start writing poetry, it took experiencing a form of performance poetry to push S into creating her own performance pieces.

Now that S is an established performance poet, she has her own audience members that she makes a great impact on.

A asked S, “Can you tell me about a specific time that maybe a certain audience member told you that your poetry made an impact on their life?”

S said, “Yes um I had a woman come up to me and um in Television Daddy there's a number of poems of difficult relationship with father and I always catch it in terms of some television thing but that's a way to sometimes if you have something else to look at you can bring out difficult stuff on the side,”

A, “Okay.”

S, “So and she you know uh one of them is about abuse by a father and she said that she was able to get in touch with abuses with her mother and to think about it and to start writing about it”

A, “Mhm”

S, “So there are any number of experiences like that that I've had that's one specific person I know who spoke of it um and I have three different shows a fourth one now that's going to be opening in May and um they're all very different from each other it also helps to stretch me creatively to think about my audiences that I'm building that they need to have some surprises so um one of my shows is Ashes, Ashes a Poet Response to the Holocaust a very profound and consistent response from the audience which is um I've read about the holocaust I've researched the holocaust but I never got it until I saw your performance because you got me on the emotional body level”

A, “Oh wow”

S, “and that's what poetry does it makes us experience something not just rhetorically but as a full body emotional experience so um those you know that's important and and I and in my performances I often talk about the power of poetry in the Ashes, Ashes performance I talk about why it's important to you to experience the poetry of the holocaust because it's too easy to get lost in numbers in fact there is a poem about numbers.”

S speaking about the impact her performance pieces make on her audience members allows us to see how truly life changing performance poetry can be. The fact that audiences can experience these poems on, as S said, “an emotional body level,” allows them to open up and become vulnerable to what the poem is making them feel. S also comments about her “Ashes, Ashes” performance and the consistent comments she gets about how audience members never understood the holocaust before viewing the performance. The holocaust is history that is talked about a lot. By audience members saying that it took S's performance piece for them to really understand it speaks volumes. This comment alone shows how much of an impact a poetry performance makes. Also, S talks about how her “Television Daddy” performance allowed a woman to cope with abuse she endured from her mother. In both instances, S's performance pieces allowed audience to connect to the poems at hand. They were able to relate to them and really feel something because of these performances.

On the other hand, one can argue that print poetry is just as effective as performance poetry; however, because of the way print poetry is taught in school settings audiences shy away from or already have a negative stereotypical view of print poems. The negative thoughts towards poetry automatically creates a wall between a reader and a poem. In performance pieces this wall disappears because it is such a new and almost out of body experience.

A asked S, “Um so I know that you were saying that all your poems are print poems first do you think it makes like a bigger impact on an audience to see it performed as opposed to reading it in print?”

S said, “It makes a different impact.”

A said, “okay”

S said, “um when we're reading something on the page um we are at our discretion as to how long you will read it we can go back to it uh we can leave it in the bathroom you know so you know all those things affect a reading where you read it uh how often you read it what time of day you read it you know if you read it with somebody else so uh reading silently gives a whole different experience um if you read something aloud that's uh in it's you know it's the medium”

A said, “right”

S Said, “if you know it's a different discourse in a sense”

A said, “right”

S said, “um uh cause it's not oral when you're just reading it on the page and so forth um one of my purposes is to involve the audience there's some call and response um to bring in people to appreciating poetry who wouldn't otherwise because poetry people are made to feel afraid of poetry”

A said, “mhm”

S said, “because I'm afraid there's a lot of bad teaching going on about what poetry is”

A said, “yeah”

S said, “and how to appreciate it and so by embodying these and doing multimedia I'm hoping to bring people to say oh poetry's about me to go listen to people who read poetry to other poets who read looking down and then ultimately to go to the page itself”

A said, “okay”

S said, “So um cause we live in such a multimedia world with so many different kinds of literacy you know I'm trying to pull on people from different literacies to be willing to look at the page.”

This excerpt from the interview with S shows that, yes, both print poems and performance poems do impact an audience, but in today's world performance poems impact audience on a different level. Since, as S said, “we live in such a multimedia world,” it is important in today's society for audience members to be reached through many different mediums. In doing performance pieces, S is allowing herself to reach her audience on many different levels. She can involve the audience however she sees fit. She can get a sense of what the audience member's emotions are and can pull on those emotions and use them to her advantage which allows her to make a bigger impact on an audience than a print poem does. Poems in print don't have the advantages that performance poets have. Therefore, it is much more difficult for a poem in print to make a big impact on an audience member in the way that a performance poem can.

The reason performance pieces are more effective than print poetry is because audience members are allowed to feel how they want, experience the poem through different multimedia modes, and are not limited to finding one specific meaning to the poem. Individuals are allowed to believe the poem means whatever they want it to mean. Both performance and print poems do make an impact on an audience, but performance pieces allow poets to reach and connect with audience members in a way that print poetry has a very difficult time accomplishing.