BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!

Subject: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 12:27 AM

This is all you gotta do. Watch the video. Become totally cool and a legend in your own mind. Impress the chicks. Get laid more often. Drink a lot of latte. Go crazy.

The keys to mastering performance poetry

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Amergin
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 01:25 AM

ROFLMAO! The man is spot on! I have seen many poets get up on the stage with their battered notebooks, imperiously gazing up at the crowd as they stare up at them in attention....and they throw in these three or four syllable words written to impress the audience with the poet's wide vocabulary, yet destroying the essence of the imagery they were trying to invoke. You can almost see their fingers snap in time with their rhythm, and if you could see their eyes beneath the glint of the stage lights, you would know they yearn to rub their shoulders with the greats...yet for most part their words are but bits of gas bursting from their ass...

The good ones, you can tell those too....they are the ones who get up and read or recite, not to impress so much as to do their thing, to share their work, their experiences, their views, with those assembled.

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: meself
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 01:40 AM

Funny, I suppose. On the other hand, I gather from the comments that that was Billy Collins sitting on the stage - I would far rather have watched a video of his reading ...

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: CarolC
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 03:39 AM

Poets are those who muddy their own waters in order to make them appear deep.

;-P

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 05:15 AM

CarolC your statement I could hallow!
But for the fact,
that muddy waters,
can sometimes
appear.............. shallow!


That I muddy my waters, as and when I can,
Does not make me feel that much less, of a man.
What you think of my rhymes, I just don't give a damn,
It's all part of 'what', not 'who' I am!!!

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Jeanie
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 09:19 AM

That video is so spot on, Little Hawk - thank you ! He mimics the awful dull tone perfectly.
I think it's very rare for a poet to be able to perform his/her own work well - it's far better left to actors, who know how to vary pitch, pace and emphasis properly. But try suggesting that to a Performance Poet some time....

It's strange, because people perform their own songs just fine, but when it comes to poetry, oooh dear.

- jeanie

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: CarolC
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 01:08 PM

Higgledy Piggledy
Carol the smartass was
Quoting some wisdom from
Friedrich Nietzsche

Poets, he argued most
Incontrovertibly,
Muddy their waters (thank
God it's not pee).

;-P

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 01:13 PM

LOL @ CarolC......

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 01:27 PM

The really wonderful thing about it for me is...there was a guy in my town for years who did performance poetry and he did virtually EVERYTHING exactly like in that skit. To the nines. He wore ALL black clothing (except for a white Edwardian ruffle at the throat...very dramatic!). I bet even his underwear was black, though I cannot say for sure. His sentences all went up? At the end? He did the sing-song routine and employed the use of bizarre juxtapositions of images that don't make sense together. He was possessed with a pathological need to have other people's attention riveted upon him at all times, and he went to great lengths to secure it by acting odd and dramatic. He found the sound of his own voice almost orgasmic, I would assume. He didn't normally smoke...except that he would smoke a good cigar now and then, with great flourish and panache. This was a way of symbolically setting himself aside from the common herd, as he was an artiste, a true nonconformist, a man engaged in a solitary and courageous crusade against the wretched commonality of a blind society on the road to perdition. He liked music that almost NOBODY else his age would listen to, because he was cooler than they were. He lived in an attic. Well, to be fair, it was a sort of a garrett at the topmost level of a rental accommodation. You got up there by climbing a long series of wrought-iron stairs on the outside of the building. He had a big chain attached to his black jeans...I think it was to hold keys and stuff like that. He wore a Van Dyke sort of beard and mustache. He would rave dramatically upon the stage, making those little hand gestures to emphasize the words, accompanying his vocal forays sometimes by beating upon a collection of iron junk that he had built into a spidery kind of standing structure. He would flail away at the iron whatchamacallit with a spatula or something (can't quite remember what it was), producing a terrible racket through which he would holler complex lines of doggerel having to do with death, angst, a mad society, and the various imponderable burdens that fall upon a young man who is determined to be DIFFERENT in a way that yields no useful result whatsoever.

Matter of fact, he was quite a bit stranger than the guy in the video. But the guy in the video at least points the way toward eventually achieving what the guy in my town had mastered. ;-)

Never was so much energy expended in a cause of such dubious merit, but I can at least say this: he seemed to enjoy doing it.

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 03:09 PM

Taylor Mali is a wonderful performance poet. Many of his poems are about teaching, language, and literature. They are often inspirational and always funny. You can find more of his videos by following links from the above YouTube page.

Subject: RE: BS: Performance poetry - all you need know!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 23 Jan 09 - 04:32 PM

The exquisite pain of a poet's existence is something ordinary people just can't fully grasp or appreciate, try though they might. It's a lonely life, but not without its rewards.

For instance, it's a lot more fun than mime...

The guy I knew wrote and performed a whole series of poems and plays about his own death. It was a subject that fascinated him, along with the sense of his Christ-like crucifixion by an idiotic society that doesn't care.

I met him years later, though, and he was still alive. Things seldom work out as neatly as we envisioned them in the passion of youth.