Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory

Performance of the Lyric “I”

173 Performance of the Lyric “I” A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions , pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. —Theodor Adorno1 I once polled my poet friends, asking if they remembered the first poetry reading they attended. Karen Garthe remembers hearing Robert Creeley at Goucher College when she was a high school student, deciding then and there that she wanted to write poems herself. Another friend recalls being struck by Galway Kinnell ’s deep voice and good looks. The first poet I heard read was Robert Lowell, at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1973; I can’t remember what he read, but I can still see his tall form being helped to the podium by my professor. I remember, too, his voice, and my sense that this was something special, a performance that could never again be repeated because of its unique time and place. This was an art form I didn’t know: not theater, not concert, but something wonderful containing elements of both. For young lovers of words, a poetry reading might be the first time that the art is both powerful and embodied. Poetry readings are performances that are often not recognized as such, and they are full of contradictions. My focus is on the “lyric I,” poets who read or recite from memory their own printed work, and the ramifications of those live performances. Although I am not focusing on poets who write primarily for the ear and the stage (“slam poets”), or on Poetry Out Loud, the national program that since 2006 has coached high school students to perform the work of published poets, these two venues 174 do provide insights into what makes a good performance, which is also part of my analysis. In ancient Greece and medieval Europe, the oral performance of poems—primarily epics—connected groups of listeners by offering a new, shared experience. Moreover, speech was deemed more trustworthy than writing because of the presence of a physical body. Centuries later, the eighteenth-century American insistence on truth in public speaking and the accompanying class and gender tensions resulting from a culture where a broader swath of people are orators are described by Jay Fliegelman in Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. This period saw a shift from stylized to more naturalistic delivery, leading public speakers such as historian Edward Gibbon to say, “I dreaded exposing myself.”2 Fliegelman points out that men as well as women were well aware of the risk of public exposure, that “in Latin, publicus signifies a public man or magistrate, publica a public woman or prostitute.”3 While we—in the United States at least—have come a long way in diminishing the negative consequences when women engage in public display, I’m interested in how poetry readings are evaluated as performances, and I wonder if a trace of shame lingers. Even after print technology transformed reading into a private experience and the novel became the dominant genre, reading texts aloud (both prose and poetry) remained a communal , social experience. But after World War I reading aloud declined, Peter Middleton points out, as new technologies such as film and later, television, offered more exciting entertainments .4 In the mid-twentieth century, reading aloud reappeared, this time with an emphasis on the author himself or herself. Donald Hall notes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, poets such as Walt Whitman lectured but rarely read their own poems; however, in the 1920s and 1930s poets such as Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost traveled across the United States performing their poems. In 1921 William Carlos Williams had an unsuccessful reading of Kora in Hell. In 1943 Wallace Stevens pronounced, “I am not a troubadour” and refused to perform.5 Gertrude Stein considered her lecture tour 175 in the forties—one that made her a celebrity—as a chance to explain the poems that baffled readers. Also in the forties, Dylan Thomas’ U.S. tour became the emblem of “both excellence and the freak show.”6 The fifties, Donald Hall remembers, proved a booming decade for poetry readings. The popularity of live readings, Hall argues, played a role in poets writing for the platform—making more accessible poems, usually lighter in tone, that is...