Fat Jersey Blues

Why I Am Not a Performance Poet

6 Why I Am Not a Performance Poet I’m too morose too much of the time or too cynical or not overt enough in my politics—whatever they are this second or this—or too satisfied with the material conditions I’ve deluded myself into thinking I’ve earned or too alert to narcissism (having spent decades bent over the water) or too eager to defend my own righteousness & my acute awareness of flaws I’ve spent a lifetime basting with the hot fat of flayed well-being or too old or not old enough not to give a fuck & just get up there & bellow or whisper or weep or too flummoxed by the need to establish something called “cred” by stabbing the air with one or two or all five digits, torso tilted, one foot lifted a little off the floor or too bored by the sledgehammer iambs & mock-opera spondees or too much in love with books (a state impossible to imagine), which performance poets nowadays seem to ignore or disdain. I could be wrong. Maybe I’ve seen & heard the wrong performance poets the twenty or thirty times I’ve found myself baffled & assaulted thereby. Carlos Robson did wet my eyes one night toward the end of what he did. Hey man, I’m only saying as some would say. I say “nowadays” because Ed Sanders & Tuli Kupferberg not only performed poems so hilarious & profane & zapped with zany joy it didn’t matter they couldn’t sing or play the instruments they played, but also wrote & loved & even sold books. Or The Last Poets, who deserve their own poem or book of them. Or Gil Scott-Heron before the drugs cooked him down to the Plato of cold cereal. Or Patti Smith, at whom I yelled Pitman! Glassboro! Mullica Hill! as she declaimed “Piss Factory” one night in Pittsburgh. I envy performance poets, have tried & failed to become 7 a performance poet, yearn to clone the scop or troubadour encoded in my genome, but my head’s too big for hats, let alone one of those cool straw porkpies performance poets —male ones, usually—perch on the crowns of their heads. Or those floppy things like the Dead-End Kids wore or the vast, woolen sacks under which the dreads I once yearned to grow will never pile tangled & sour, poaching under stage lights at the Bitter End or behind the Gates of Eden. Ah, well. Bless the heads of poets performing. Bellow away. Whisper & weep. That’s what it comes down to. ...