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This year I would like to start working with publishing companies to coach touring writers on performance.
I’ve been acting for 25 years, teaching acting for 5, writing poems for almost 25, reading out loud for like 20, through a lens which, forgive me, has nothing to do with slam or literary academia. I was born for this.
We all know the issues with the academic mode of reading: it’s boring. The reader is attempting to bring the poem to the listener the way it appears on the page to the reader, which is futile. When I’m listening to a reader, I don’t care about linebreaks or spacing.
I care about having an experience. I don’t have the poem in front of me—I can’t be my own shepherd. Talk to me. Communicate to me. This doesn’t mean you have to enter the exact emotional space you were in when writing (or living) the poem. It means I need you to engage with me.
The other side of that is slam. A great deal of slam-informed performance I’ve encountered seems to use the listener’s guilt as a tool, which is an unfortunate side effect of performing for scores. Guilt is a powerful tool by which to manipulate a judge.
This has nothing to do with subject matter, but a style of performance that seems to ask the listener/judge “How can you give a low score to someone so broken?” It becomes not about the poem, but about the performer’s brokenness and how willing they are to inhabit it.
This isn’t only bad performance, it’s dangerous for the performer. It asks for a perfect reentry into the trauma that informed the poem—even if that poem was written at a great distance from the original trauma. As a mode of performance it’s alienating, bullying, exclusive.
Poems that may be wonderful on the page—generous, dangerous, honest, etc—are obliterated by this kind of reading.
In between these two modes of reading, academic and “slam,” which refers only the practice of performing poems for scores, there is communication. An inclusive, compelling performance that foregrounds the poem but does not lose sight of the audience.
I think that if this kind of performing were taught and explored, literary performance could see a sort of resurgence. This is what I hope to offer.
Excited to yell into the void about this for the rest of my life.
