Boring Readings are Not Always Bad

A recent photo of me at a poetry reading got me thinking.

Many poets have told me privately that sitting through poetry readings can be tough. Dull. Boring. Inane.

I would say the same thing, but even a tedious reading experience, like the walk through a non-descript part of town, can be good for the soul.

The fact is that I was not sleeping during the reading pictured above. It was mostly a terrific reading, and I was actually concentrating--or, on occasion, during lesser moments, trying to concentrate--on what the readers were saying and how they were saying it. I was submitting to other people's thoughts in a way that, at least when they aren't shuffling papers or checking their text messages and email, audience members do at poetry readings.

How rare that is: total submission to the workings of someone else's mind, in a public setting, for an extended period of time. Contemplation in company. The suppression of one's own desire to express anything other than approval or indifference.

Boredom at readings happens for different reasons. Sometimes the poetry being performed is boring, dull, inane. More often, however, it gives us something valuable to consider, Marianne Moore's "place for the genuine," even when the poetry is crude or unsophisticated. When the former is true, boredom can move poets and others rapidly to introspection, the opposite of public participation; or it can lead poet/audience members to reflect on what to avoid in their own poetry. When the latter is true, we can drift into contemplation, and find it difficult to stay with the next poem or next poet simply because we are preoccupied. This is an eternal conflict for many people, especially for writers: how to appreciate a revelation and still remain in the moment, remain outwardly focused.

Of course, poets may be bored by readings simply because they have had to leave the orbits of their egos. They could hardly, after all, be poets without egos. At readings they are forced to listen closely to people they have not necessarily chosen to hear, particularly if the event in question includes an open mic. Listening closely, or at least trying to, is an exercise in humility, which tempers ego and leads to greater compassion.

So are we necessarily complaining about poetry readings or about certain poets when we say were bored by particular readings? Maybe. Or maybe we're just complaining about having to do our work. 

Sitting Down with Poets of the Bay: Episode 2

The moment I arrive, the reading is over. I've stayed too long at coffee in Alameda with my college roommate. Life is short, and the nature of the Lunch Poems series is uncertain. Still, I've driven out to Berkeley, albeit too late to hear members of the faculty and staff read. As the audience chats with the readers and begins to file out, I approach someone who appears to be in charge, and ask if he is Robert Hass, the great poet who curates the series. I should know what Hass looks like, but I do not. He is not Hass. But he is a librarian and can point me to a small man making his deliberate, downcast way to the door. He appears to be, in the words of Emanuel Carnevali, a hurried man.

Alexander Givental is a professor of mathematics. Like the other readers, he is not a poet per se. When I ask to speak with him, he eyes me suspiciously, explains, in a fairly thick Russian accent, that he is on his way to class, but could talk for a few minutes. In the meantime the librarian continues corraling readers with whom I might speak. As I'll need to do a lot, I diplomatically move from one to the other, explaining my project and enlisting their help. Givental waits patiently by the door until the handshakes and exchanges of cards are done.

When I finally return to him, Givental allows me to suggest that we re-enter the venue, Morrison Library, where he and other readers stood at a podium before a marble hearth, reading poetry to nearly a hundred people seated on comfortable couches and in leather wing chairs nicely placed around the 200' x 50' space, while students studying at gallery tables above tried to concentrate on the first-week reading. The walls here are oak, the floors, like the hearth, marble. Busts of Roman statesmen sit atop built-in bookshelves below enormous windows with views of the Berkeley Hills, huge spruce trees and campus buildings of various vintage.

We choose a comfortable couch near the hearth. I admit to Givental that I did not hear him read. He is kind, and explains that, with a collaborator, he's just done a volume of poems by the twentieth-century Russian poet Marina Tsetaeva, To You in 10 Decades. He hands me the book, and we begin to talk about why a mathematician at one of the nation's leading universities is translating poetry. It has to do with his education in Russia, with the place of poetry in people's lives there, and with his willingness to be part of poetry in America.  

Sitting Down with Poets of the Bay: Episode 1

Neeli Cherkovski is posting a picture to Facebook: the cover of the Italian translation of one of his books. Can I help? I'm distracted by the shelves and shelves of poetry lining his snug study, but I dutifully follow to his computer, bag full of recording equipment still on my shoulder. It turns out I actually know what to do. I help. But this is a small gift compared to the one Neeli will give me.

He and his fifteen year-old behemoth of a dog, Cosmo, lead me to the deck in the small yard behind Neeli's house in Bernal Heights, San Francisco's most vertiginous neighborhood. It's 11:30 in the morning on a typically sunny and comfortably warm/cool day. The house is quiet. Neeli's partner of thirty years is at work. The dog is trying to bark, but has a respiratory ailment that renders his bark more of a faint chuff. The only other sound is the breeze--The breeze must be perpetual here--rustling through the potted bamboo. 

Neeli sits on a patio chair in the corner of the deck. I switch on the voice recorder. Neeli begins talking, I fumble with the video camera, afraid, as he speaks to its lens, that I'm not actually recording him. Which is a shame, because Neeli is a trove. So I pace the deck, wanting my body language to match the genuine intensity of my interest. Every once in a while I tweak the camera, all the time listening to one insight after another. 

    

Starting in San Francisco (O. K., Berkeley)

Prominent California poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia has written eloquently of the Bay Area literary scene. In his 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, Gioia reminds us that at the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco was a literary hub, home of a "Populist Modernism" in which "Poetry was not conceived as a self-enclosed text for private meditation but as a direct address to an audience" (92). Between the early twentieth century and the publication of his book, Gioia claims, Bay Area literary culture had waned, a development he blames on the rise of West Coast suburbia and the ascendancy of automobile culture. No longer is it easy for Bay Area poets and artists to gather, as they did in the time of Jack London and Bret Harte, or of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. San Francisco thus no longer offers "a critical mass of enterprise and opportunity" (95) to support a vital local literary community.

And, in what is perhaps his most trenchant comment, Gioia remarks that the lack of critical mass and the resulting lack of a local coterie of the best writers and critics the region can offer has led to local "boosterism, the uncritical praise of all things local," which is "not merely a poor substitute for arts criticism, it is also...a slow poison to native excellence" (102-103). Anyone who takes part in a local poetry scene, who is aware of the historical development of various poetic conventions, and who believes that poetry should offer not just observation, but also insight and in some cases spiritual and moral vision, can see truth in Gioia's remarks. (Of course such a position may be fairly understood as cultural snobbery.) What can happen, and often does, on such as scene, is that a city's or other locale's literary culture can thrive, but will likely become "necessarily retrospective," worshipful of its past literary glories. In the Bay Area today, as in some other places around the country, the objects of worship remain the Beats, a group that has produced an uneven body of work, at least as measured by the culturally "snobbish" standards described above; and a group whose existence in large part depended on their creation of a performance poetry scene.

I don't yet know how literary culture and the poetry scene of the Bay Area have changed over the last decade, but I do know, as Gioia predicted in 2004, that the literary community there has leveraged the power of the Internet to create a myriad of new journals and to develop connections that have resulted in a scene averaging a half-dozen readings daily at a variety of venues. Of course the migration of money and ambitious intellect back to urban areas of the last decade (Brooklyn being a leading example) has also been a factor in reestablishing the "critical mass" that Gioia laments.

Still, a lot of the Bay Area's and the nation's literary activity has migrated not back to the City, but to the Internet, of which the Bay Area has been the cradle, the nursery and now the proving ground. What then have our poetry scenes become in the Age of the Internet? And what better place to ask that question than in San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley? I will head there this fall, to seek answers.

Gioia claims, finally., that literary culture has been centralized in New York City" and fears that the "global standardization of electronic media" (105) will lead to homogenized literature and literary scenes. He believes too that local culture "matters because human existence is local" (106). I hope my research both questions the idea that our literature has taken a turn toward homogeneity; and that it reveals more about the state of our local cultures.

  

The Questionnaire

I used to watch as graduate fellows I "supervised" in my college's writing across the curriculum program prepared surveys to assess our progress. The fellows with social science backgrounds could write these surveys in their sleep, it seemed. I gladly let them take the lead, and peeked over their shoulders.

Now I find myself without graduate students to design or even help me design surveys, and so I spent a good part of my week after shoulder surgery trying to put together an instrument I could, without shame, give poets who perform their work and agree to take part in the research for Virtue. The project is gaining a momentum that I probably couldn't stop if I wanted to. Having finally sent off all necessary documents to my college's IRB, and having finally planned the first research trip to San Francisco, I am now approaching the time when I can begin interviewing, filming and asking people to complete this survey on which I've labored.

The printed survey will travel with me to research destinations, and will go out in electronic form through email or Survey Monkey. But is it too long? Is it too determinate? Is it too open-ended? Is it too much to ask? Maybe as a way of obfuscating the answers, I've refused to number it. Or maybe that's just the kind of evasive maneuver that goes along with not understanding exactly what the research will tell me, and where this project and its attendant paper airplanes will land. 

So here you go, small world, a sneak peak at the quarry from which I will mine my foundation of :

Virtue at the Coffee House: Poetry and Performance Across America

Dr. George Guida

Participant Survey

The following survey should take 15-20 minutes to complete, and will provide valuable data for a study of poetry in performance across America. Any publications or productions resulting from this research will attribute the answers you provide only if you grant consent (See the accompanying consent form).


Name______________________________________

Date_______________

Gender:  male [  ] female [  ]     transgendered [   ]


Age Group:  18-25 [  ] 26-33  [  ] 34-40 [   ] 41-48  [  ] 49-55 [  ]

55-62 [  ] 63-70 [  ] 71-79 [  ] 80+ [  ]

Exact Age (in years) [Optional]: _____________


In what city and state were you raised?_________________________________________


In what city and state do you currently reside?___________________________________


How long have you lived in your current city and state? (Please check one.)

0-3 years [  ]   3-7 years [  ] 8-12 years [  ]    13-19 years [  ]     20 + years  [  ]

Lifelong Resident [  ]


Do you write creatively?

Yes  [  ] No  [  ]



What do you write? (You may indicate more than one genre.)

poetry [  ] fiction [  ] drama [  ] non-fiction [  ]

other [  ] (Please specify)_________________________________




How often do you write creative work?

every day [  ]   several times per week [  ] once per week [  ]   several times per month [   ]

less often than monthly [  ] rarely [  ]


How long have you been writing creative work?

less than 1 year [  ] 1-3 years [  ] 3-7 years [  ]  8-12 years [  ]  13-19 years [  ]

20+ years [  ] since childhood [  ]


At what age did you begin writing? _____________


Do you read or perform your work in public?

Yes [  ] No [  ]


On the average, how often do you read or perform your work in public?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]


Where have you read or performed your work?

poetry club [  ]     other clubs (music, comedy, dinner) [  ]   theater [  ]

coffee house [  ] libraries [  ] college or university [  ] school [  ]

community center [  ] poetry festival [  ]

other venue [  ] (please specify)_________________________________


At which type of venue have you read or performed your work most often?
(Please choose from the options in the previous questions)



Do you attend readings and performances of creative writing in which you are not taking part?

Yes [  ] No [  ]


How often do you attend readings and performances in which you are not taking part?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]


Where do you most often attend poetry events in which you are not taking part?

poetry club [  ]     other clubs (music, comedy, dinner) [  ]   theater [  ]

coffee house [  ] libraries [  ] college or university [  ] school [  ]

community center [  ] poetry festival [  ]

other venue [  ] (please specify)_________________________________


What types of readings or performances in which you are not taking part do you attend most often?

open mic [  ] poetry feature with an open mic [  ] poetry feature [  ]

group poetry reading [  ] benefit poetry reading [  ] group poetry reading [  ]

poetry festival [  ] event combining poetry with music or other artistic genre [  ]


How often you share your creative writing online?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]   never [  ]

On what Web site(s) or in what other online venue(s) do you  context?

Websites_______________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Social Media Sites________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Blogs________________________________________________________________________________


How often you share your creative writing by email?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]   never [  ]


How often do you read other writers' unpublished creative work on line?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]   never [  ]


How important a role does creative writing play in your life?

very important [  ] important [  ] somewhat important [  ]

somewhat unimportant [  ] unimportant [  ]

(Please briefly comment on its importance.)













How important a role does reading or performance play in your life?

very important [  ] important [  ] somewhat important [  ]

somewhat unimportant [  ] unimportant [  ]

(Please briefly comment on its importance.)






How important a role do you believe public readings and performances of creative writing play in the life of your community [town, neighborhood, group, other community]?

very important [  ] important [  ] somewhat important [  ]

somewhat unimportant [  ] unimportant [  ]

(Please briefly comment on its importance.)






Do you use public readings and performances of your work as a way to gauge its success or to improve it?

always [  ] often [  ] sometimes [  ] occasionally [  ] never [  ]

(Please briefly comment on your use of readings and performances for this purpose.)













How much have public readings and performances of your own work influenced the substance or style of your creative writing?

a lot [  ] somewhat [  ] a little [  ] not at all [  ]

(Please briefly comment on this influence.)









How much have public readings and performances by other writers influenced your creative writing?

a lot [  ] somewhat [  ] a little [  ] not at all [  ]

(Please briefly comment on this influence.)









Why do you read or perform your work in public? (You may choose more than one answer.)

to gain acknowledgement for my work [  ]   to enjoy sharing my work with an audience [  ]

to gain inspiration from other poets [  ] to discuss poetry with other poets [  ]

to network with other poets [  ] to feel a part of a community [  ] (Please specify

the type of community—group of poets, neighborhood, town, other community)____________________________________________________________________





Do you identify with any particular group(s) of poets, writers or artists? (If so, please identify this group by its name or its association with a certain venue, location or endeavor.)

Yes [  ] No [  ]

Name of Group__________________________________________________________________



Please take a few moments to comment on your experience of performing poetry or watching poetry performed. Why do you read or perform your work in public? What have been your best and worst experiences on the poetry scene? What have you gained or lost from these experiences?

Poetry, Magic and First Grade

Today I visited my son's first-grade class, to talk about poetry as a kind of magic. I explained to the six  and seven year-olds that we could use words to turn things into other things. A person who writes a poem can use this magic to make something his or hers for the rest of his or her life. If that person is lucky, he or she can make it part of some other people's lives too.

I had planned to begin by reading T. S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats," which would lead nicely into a little acrostic exercise. (As I suspected, they had already done an acrostic poem--about SPRING--as part of their National Poetry Month activities.) Of course, when I asked, "Does any of you have a cat?" nearly every hand in the class shot up. And when I asked, "What are your cats' names?" the kids not only wanted to share their cats' names, but also talk about other people's pets and other kinds of pets (dogs, of course) and about how they got their pets and even about why, where and how their pets had died. All this together was a poem we should have written right then. Instead, we used the activity to break the ice and get them to Eliot's cats, whom, I claimed, Eliot had turned into characters who would become stars in a Broadway show. (Many stared blankly upon hearing this news.)

When we finally got through half of Eliot's poem (which claims that all cats need three names), the teacher and I asked the kids to take out pencils and notebooks, which they eagerly did. I then asked them to write their names on a page, one letter under the other; and to write for each letter the first word they could think of that started with that letter. To my amazement, not a single child used "poop," "butt" or "fart," but then each child was turning himself or herself into something new, unexpected and happy. The process was an exercise in imagination and spelling, and allowed me to see just how varied language skills can be at this tender age (as they are among adult learners.) Some kids needed a lot of help finding and spelling words, some needed none, and some wanted to write full sentences for each letter and even add illustrations. I did notice that no matter what they were doing, most of the kids were smiling as they put their poems together. When one boy said he wanted to us "ninja" for the letter "n," I said, "Great. Ninja's an awesome word." He lit up, and a girl near him wrote "awesome" for her letter "a."

Each time the teacher spotted a job well done, she told the child/poet to go to the front and take a ticket from the ticket box. (Children in the class can redeem these tickets for prizes--one reason I think the world of my son's teacher.) When they all finished, they read aloud word collages that did indeed transform at least the way they saw their own names--some through images of llamas, minivans and donuts in juxtaposition, and some through simple music like the two Ryans' compositions:

Rat
YoYo
Apple
Nut

and

Robot
YoYo
Apple
Nut

which I asked the class to chant, as a way to show them how music is a big part of poetry and language.

My son Bradley, seated, and standing at times, next to me at the front of the class, whispered in my ear that he wanted us to do our last names too. I promised I'd give that poem as an optional homework assignment, which the teacher later called a "challenge," as indeed it is.

With just ten minutes left, I wrote on the Smartboard the word "compare" and asked the kids if they knew what it meant and why we compared things. Most said we compared things when we had more than one thing, to tell them apart (just as they said we named pets to avoid confusing them). I explained that we could also compare one thing to another, to help understand the first thing better or in a new way. I then asked the students to imagine that a group of kids from, "Where class?" --From Japan(i) or Paris--was visiting. "Imagine that they didn't know anything about your class. What would you compare it to? So finish this sentence: Ms. ________ 's class is like..."

"It's like a crazy learning place," one girl yelled.
"It's like my bedroom," another added.
"Good," I said, "how is it like your bedroom?"
"Well, I have a play in my bedroom to play, and a place to work."
"Great," I said, "Class, what room in your house is Ms. ________'s classroom like?"

Keeping their boundless imaginations in mind, I left them with this chance to transform reality, poems they could write with their families.

"Imagine things that never happen in your house, and write that they're happening." I gave them this example: "In our house our pet kangaroo sweeps the floors on Sundays." So I fully expect a lot of families in this town to be living in the jungle or in outer space by the end of the week.

Young Americans

This month I'm hosting two benefit readings. Proceeds go to Reunion Sportive d'Haiti, an organization whose mission is to provide "youth recreational sport activities, education and youth leadership development programs in impoverished communities in Haiti. Working with NOAH, we organize youth annual soccer tournaments and essay competitions in Port-Salut, Haiti, for the children affected by the 2010 earthquake. We have collaborated with Foundation Digicel to build an elementary school in the village of Roche-Jabouin, so that children no longer have to walk three hours to receive a basic education. We believe in working side-by-side with local communities to reduce the effects of poverty, to promote rural economic development, to assist communities in education projects, and to stop the spread of the cholera epidemic by providing clean water and sanitation."

Our cause is obviously a good one, which has drawn the participation of a number of poets I had expected to participate, along with a number I had not. Among this second group are children, specifically the two young sons of a married couple of poets who took part in a benefit on Long Island, for which poets were asked to show up with broadsides of their poems, which they would sell at one dollar each. All proceeds would go to RS Haiti, which they did. Toward the end of the reading, the couple asked whether or not their elder son could step up to the Mic at the Sip This Cafe' in Valley Stream. He read a terrific little poem that he had apparently written a couple of years earlier, after which we all gathered around the table to shop for broadsides and to talk.

In the course of our conversation it came out that the two boys were Presidential trivia whizzes, who had appeared on a number of national political television programs. So here were two prodigies in both American politics and poetry, getting to know their country's landscape and learning to write a kind of plain-spoken poetry of which W. C. Williams would approve. Meeting them made me wonder about how we introduce children to poetry, and about the nature of children's poetry programs across the country. Surely, not every child involved with poetry will have two poet parents who take him or her to adult readings and simultaneously encourage the kind of scholarship that can nourish future work.

What are we teaching kids about and through poetry? What opportunities are we creating for them to encounter poetry? What kinds of opportunities do we think we're creating? Are we creating them just to enrich children's lives or to perpetuate the poetic species, as it were? Are we consciously developing the future voices of American verse?

It follows to ask also what sort of opportunities we create for other population groups limited by age or access. And it is certain that these questions will take this project in a few unexpected directions.