POETRY AS PERFORMANCE

I’ve read in and supported the Cafe Largo poetry night club series discussed by Jack Miles because I believe actors have as much right as anyone to try poetry and even succeed at it. Dismissing their efforts by confusing their skill as performers with their skill as poets does nothing but obfuscate the underlying intimate relation between the making of the poem and the public sharing of it. The poem is something we had to write but it is also something we want, like the bards of old, to sing and shout.

Whether there’s really a “shift” to performance is debatable. Certainly “performance art,” a loosely defined multimedia conglomeration, is a new 20th-Century genre, but it is a mistake to confuse the performance of poetry with the poetic aspects of performance art. Poets have performed their poems since Homer, with and without embellishments. Maybe poet/actor Michael Lally and poet Eve Brandstein, founders of ‘Poetry in Motion’, noticed some incipient talent among fellow actors and foster this by giving them a place to perform. Maybe the exploding L.A. poetry scene is becoming so exciting and vibrant that everyone is attracted to it, even celebrities. Anybody out there ever hear of a bloke named Shakespeare?

AUSTIN STRAUS

“THE POETRY CONNEXION”

KPFK RADIO