evo devo the real three

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Evo Devo — The Stand Up Poet

By 2005-2010 I’d come some distance in trying to develop my poetic sensibilities and style.

I’d expressed the usual frustrations as a teenager, plonking emotions that didn’t have that much behind them yet squack down on the page for all to see. And be bored by. In later life, I experimented with randomness and wordplay to develop a proficiency with vocabulary. I gained more life experience than I really wanted, and suddenly had plenty of material to write something genuinely substantial about. I developed and never lost a healthy sense of experimentation to fuel my imaginative offerings. And I had finally come to a point where I fused all these components together into a still evolving, richly rewarding approach to language and life.

Then, during this period in the twenty-oughts, I started doing fairly regular live poetry readings …

I’d done some previously in the old sick, pre-surgery days. But as with everything else from that period, my memories are a little blurry of the experience. But when I picked up the practice again, I was clear on two things.

Reading poetry to yourself and sitting in an audience trying to comprehend orally recited poetry are two very different things. And any given poem may play very differently depending upon which method you use to deliver it.

This came home to me most strongly when I won both second place and an honourable mention in a local writing contest. The winners were naturally expected to perform their winning poems live. Going in, it was obvious to me and the judges, who had only read the two pieces to themselves, why the poem that took second place did that, and why the other one got only an honourable mention. Then I read them out loud to the audience.

Unexpectedly, the honourable mention, which was actually a more complex subject treated with more difficult language, had a lot more drama to it that a vocal performance enhanced tremendously. While the second place piece, a clearer story in simpler language told in rather a monotone, read flat out loud. Although lingering over its development as you read it to yourself is more pleasant than reading the honourable mention to yourself.

Weird.

So I realized that some poetry is better suited for performance than others. But performing poetry live at any time is always fraught with peril. Most people I’ve canvassed on the subject agree you can only concentrate hard enough to listen to even a good poet for about ten minutes max at a time. God forbid anyone try to give you a fifteen minute performance, or even worse a twenty minute plus. You can pretty much guarantee no one’ll really still be listening after twelve. And you can count on the fact no one will understand a thing you have to say past a certain point of saturation. Which comes quicker for some people than for others.

The strengths of poetry in written form rapidly become weaknesses when an audience has to try to follow the gist of things out loud. Half the time getting the meaning isn’t even that easy when you’re reading it to yourself, and there you can at least go over the difficult bits any number of times. Out loud the listener only has one shot at it. Should your audience blink, cough, or more likely, yawn at the wrong moment, you’re lost. So it seems to me when poetry is read out loud, the poem by itself is not enough. The performance of the poem becomes paramount.

Not that there aren’t plenty of poets who won’t try to carry the evening through sheer ego alone …

I’m constantly experimenting in what I like to read to people, and carefully noting reactions. It’s astonishing to me how I can go from having the audience hanging on my every word in one piece, to meeting a wall of blank stares with the very next poem I read, no one getting a thing. You have to pick your material very carefully.

The fact that every audience is different in what it can handle and respond to positively is another huge factor of course. Some are quite prepared for you to explore the deeper, more complex pieces. Others are only there for the laughs. Others only really respond to the little chatty bits between poems that explain and introduce, because the poetry itself is beyond them unless they have a written copy sitting in front of them to follow along with.

I discovered one evening that I can state quite plainly what I’m about to do in reading the poem I’m about to, making some great jokes about how those people are right who say poetry makes no sense, because the next one I’m about to read certainly doesn’t. And even though everyone laughs at the idea as I introduce it, when I read the poem and it becomes apparent I wasn’t lying, the audience dies. Confused by the fact that they genuinely can’t make sense of it, they no longer get the joke.

Tympanic Zen Brain

We found the halcyon bones

of the backstage bandit

filling the cameo ballroom — 

then the crowd arrives

whispering of mirrors

and hoodoo cayenne,

emphatic extract

from the midnight feast

halted discretely

by the spectral caress

of spirits walking among us.

We could tell

by the empathic jimjams 

reminding us of

unaccountable virtues

we long believed lost

behind smoking mirrors.

Light the rebel beacon,

signal the fustian fandango

and we will two-step

our orbicular nocturne.

Moonbones press tight against me

as you nightbloom

and I taste your lips

and thighs, reminiscent

of hemlock uncertainty.

There is a forgotten entrance.

I find my way again

as you lead me

through private portals.

With a hidden eye

you reveal a ruby sanctum,

the door an iron shriek

opening to reveal our

suddenly tragic hour.

The whimsical zombie

revels over our

hesitant zeitgeist.

Once more

we

sink back

into the

gaudy silhouette

of the

every day

tableau ...

Enjoyable as it is to play with, randomness isn’t always the answer, as I’ve mentioned before.

Oddly enough, however, I’ve found this one always goes over very well out loud. It’s fun to read, and people never have a problem appreciating the point.

Three Variations on an Icon:

Blackbeard’s Flag

i.

picture this — 

upon a field of black,

a white skeleton stands,

in his right hand,

he holds an hour glass,

in his left a spear

piercing a red heart

with three red blood-drops

falling

ii.

What was he on?

Bloodshot eyes,

beard up to just below ‘em

down again to his waist,

always carrying six pistols,

a cutlass in his teeth,

a sword in his hand,

hemp fuses smouldering fear

twisted in his beard and hair,

clambering over your gunwale

with those wild eyes

fixed upon your heart, egad;

and they say it took

twenty cutlass slashes,

five pistol shots,

and a slice across the jugular

to slow him down long enough

for Maynard to decapitate ‘im,

but that’s all right, that’s his metier,

he was a pirate for chrissake,

but that flag — 

the poetry of doom ...

What was he on?

iii.

Accountants, Lawyers, Administrators,

Militarists, Priests, Teachers, Specialists,

Professional Athletes, Talk Show Hosts,

Upper and Lower Management,

Elitists of the World,

Beauty Consultants, Those Who Travel,

Those Who Do Not,

Volunteer Board Presidents,

Phone Solicitors, Politicians omigod,

Incompetents of Every Ilk and Profession,

Publishers, Critics, All the Hierarchies of Hell,

poets ...

This was said to be the meaning of his flag:

“You! All of you! See the hourglass?

Your sand has run out!

Blackbeard’s come to pierce your hearts!”

but isn’t it far more likely

he knew ... he knew ...

No one is Blackbeard for long, Mr. Teach.

So he hung the image aloft

of what he feared most:

Death looks you in the eye,

the sands of fate in hand,

and when the skeleton rattles your glass

you know you only have

the time left it will take

three drops of your heart’s blood

to reach the deck

to take as many as you can

of all the bastards down with you ...

Never enough.

Unsurprisingly, given my main intent that an audience should be entertained by a poetry reading first and foremost, I’ve slowly developed what might best be described as a stand up poet shtick. The focus is on humour. I still like to mix things up, with some serious stuff, some lyrical bits, and of course the experimental. But I’ve discovered humour pleases the audience best — when they can comprehend the joke. I’ve certainly had some poems I thought were hilarious fall flat on me too. It’s a constantly changeable experience, very difficult to predict in any way. There is some material I always feel safe with, though. Like these two, for example.

an insignificant little poem

words I’d like to eat but which probably taste like vegetables

aubergine and arugula – oh – those are vegetables

but there are others so tasty they might be dessert

aloof cascading scintilla

Reviews of “an insignificant little poem” by John H. Baillie

(Translated from the French)

“a disarming honesty often similar

to a kind of wholesome stupidity”

“piling stones on this ethereal construction

creates a cathedral between heaven and earth”

“this poem’s greatest merit

is that it is above all a poem”

“affirming the primacy of the real

is it the story of some poor soul,

a madman, degenerate or genius?

Is it an adventure or a love story?

But first of all, is it a poem?

It answers by asking the question,

‘Yes, but what is poetry?’”

“I love the superficial sincerity”

“sincerely superficial”

“lacking the obligatory

Brigitte Bardot nude scene”

“there is a certain type of poetry

practiced by imbeciles who are also cynics.

After reading the poem,

we feel less intelligent

than if we had never seen it at all”

“a poem for those terribly in the know”

“sharp and fluid, precise and vague,

this poem pierces the darkness

to reveal the dry, melancholy clarity

of remembrance beyond the shadows of oblivion”

“heavier than a fruitcake”

“the shocking incompetence,

the hilarious complacency of his bluff,

the vulgarity and intellectual vacuum”

“mediocre and fuzzy”

“sinister, shapeless, and ridiculous”

“empty, stupidly pretentious,

intellectually vapid”

“at first glance, a masterpiece”

“I don’t want to trash ‘an insignificant little poem’

under the pretext that the poem is,

in so many words, badly done,

badly written, badly conceived,

badly edited, badly rhymed,

just bad. It’s all of that, of course.

But it’s worse”

“In any case,

whether you like it or not,

it exists.”

(Plagiarized, paraphrased and otherwise plundered from contemporary reviews

of French New Wave movies.) 

So, even though I’m still working on it, I have managed to develop yet another dimension of the poetic experience for myself by establishing a performance style for live readings that really works for me. My proudest moment to date was an epic reading of a very long narrative poem on the local heavy metal scene that I performed in tandem with a video my son Dylan made to visualize the story. The combination of the two media went over extremely well, each complementing the other. We both found it interesting that a rather straight narrative poem made a complex visual component perfectly comprehensible to the audience.

So now that I had all that in place, was I satisfied?

Never. There’s always room for more perilous experimentation.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Theda Bara’s winning novelletta Thirty-One Across continues this Friday at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Sorting out the rejection and acceptance. These things happen.