Live Performance | Fiction | Good Times With Weapons

Just a quick one today – and this is going to be closer to a rant than the high-quality literary journalism you’ve come to expect from this publication.

(Pause for laughter.)

Poets, I always think – with a glum touch of envy – come to live reading events equipped like a soldier in the SAS. Not even that. Better than that. Equipped like an eight-year-old child acting out the fantasy of what it must be like to be a soldier in the SAS. Crowd are sullen? Rattle out the short poems like an assault rifle! Hit them with the grenade of the haiku! Get in close for some hand-to-hand audience participation, then slug away with the slow, intensely personal shotgun-poem! Maybe even the lightsaber of the love-sonnet, for good measure. An armament for every occasion.

Pictured: a poet.

Fiction writers (and I’m talking about writers of short stories all the way up to novels, not the cunning flash-fiction and prose-poem guerrillas) come to live reading events holding one of those enormous, immensely heavy medieval weapons that was essentially a cow-sized length of metal with a handle. It only really does one thing, and its impact depends on your being able to use it as quickly as you possibly can, which is not very.

Many poets, like fiction writers, are bad at giving live readings. But poets get a chance to slink away faster if necessary, picking and choosing their poems, getting through their set with the speed and precision of a Black Hawk helicopter while fiction writers are forced to clunk their way through page after page of solid prose as elegantly as Henry VIII in his later-life suit of full plate armour.

What's that?  All these military references are making you sort of queasy?  All right, we'll stop.

It’s a serious problem. You may think your three-page short story with the killer twist is perfect for live readings, only to discover that the previous reader has bored the audience silly and they’re now beginning to shift in their seats as soon as you’ve cleared your breath. Suddenly, you don’t have nearly enough flexibility.

This is a problem which has, in the past, resulted in me ‘panic editing’ – skipping out the more descriptive sentences and even paragraphs because I’m afraid my audience is getting bored. In part, I do feel bad about that, almost as if I should hold my ground against my listeners - maybe even annunciate every word as clearly and slowly as I possibly can. But, hell, shouldn’t there be some way of giving live readings of fiction which is flexible and exciting, instead of feeling like a written medium awkwardly transposed into an oral form?

Part of the issue, I’m sure, is the nature of literary readings themselves. When Virgil gave a reading, he’d have had his audience cheering for their heroes, booing for the villains, and hurling dormice at him where they felt the story was getting a little far-fetched. Today’s culture of sitting politely and occasionally grunting appreciatively can kill the energy fast. Damn it, the whole thing’s far too civilised, too sedate; and, as Bruce Chatwin might argue, it begins to stagnate as a result.

What fiction writers need, more than ever, to put a spark back in their readings, is a crowd supplied with some rotten tomatoes, and a drunken heckler at the front who thinks he deserves to be listened too by everybody. Far, far better than a crowd supplied with a dull stupor, and an elderly gentleman at the front who’s going to raise his hand at the end and tell you exactly how your story relates to his time as an Angolan silk-trader.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Facebook | Poetry | Banter

Poetry and Facebook are my favourite odd-couple.

Coming back from a school-trip to Spain yesterday, I knew that if I logged onto Facebook then I would find the aftermath of one literary slinging match or another, and alas, I did. In this case it was the poet, Angela Readman licking her wounds over a negative comment she received in the discussion of this article. For Readman’s public retort, see here.

Nobody could have predicted what a profound effect Facebook would have on the world of poetry. Well, in fact, we could have. Let me show you a small diagram that I have put together to illustrate the 4 most important locations in the world of business:

These four locations serve a valuable purpose in the world of work. Allow me to illustrate:

Water-Cooler

You may refer to this as the ‘staff-room’ or the ‘common-room’ or perhaps the ‘down-time lounge’ if you work for an odious ‘2.0’ type of company. Basically, this is the place where you make strained conversation with other colleagues and swap grievances about certain clients you have or maybe swap stresses over certain deadlines you may have to meet. Everyone goes to the Water-Cooler at some point, and whilst some feel more comfortable there than others, it is a safe place where you can converse with colleagues in a civilised, professional way.

The Bar

Not everyone goes to the bar, but it is an important after-work institution. You want to bitch about Pat nabbing the Henderson account? Or you want to ask who the fuck Debbie Hitchens thinks she is, planning the AGM without consulting finance? Or you simply want to have a chat with a few like-minded, similar-aged colleagues about who at the office you would most like to ‘do’. The bar is your friend. Leave your political correctness at the door, and let the banter flow. There are no taboos at the bar and you can get as drunk and as objectionable as you like, just as long as you turn up to work on time and do your job well.

Home

Good old dependable home. You can speak your mind here, at home. Your family want you to do well. You can put your feet up by the fire and think about other things. Rent a movie perhaps. Eat a pretzel. You’d rather not talk about work, would you?

Workstation

This being the place where you, um, ya know, do your god-damn job.

***

So… what has that got to do with poetry?

The gift and the curse of poetry is that it does not conform to the business model. There is no steady dependable revenue, there is no ‘Poetry - AGM’, no clearly, transparently modelled hierarchy in which people have to directly answer to other people – although it is there somewhere in various smoke-filled rooms.

Most importantly though – poetry does not have the ‘4 important locations’ in the same way that your average 9-5 job will. If anything, poetry has moved to a model where the ‘4 important locations’ are all boiled down to one location – the workstation.

The computer has now become the poet’s main instrument for networking, building profile, bitching about the industry, promotion and networking. The psychological effect of this is that it turns our hands towards anything but poetry when we sit down to the keyboard – the mind can be a lazy bastard at times and it would much rather mooch around bitching about anthologies and prizes than writing the next Paradise Lost.

We also have the danger that poets, by virtue of what they do, over-analyse everything. No poet worth their salt will include a single word or phrase in a poem that they have not considered the various interpretations of. When we combine this with the conversational, half-hearted way with which most of us censor our textual output on the web, especially something as seemingly ‘fraternal’ as facebook, you can see where the egos start bruising and the issues start ballooning.

At the same time, poetry has needed facebook for a long time. It is a highly disparate, isolated profession and I am glad that poets now have the means to pool their efforts more effectively. So, to end on a high note, I want to give two of my favourite things to come from poetry and Facebook existing side by side:

Live events:

I think I must have been to about 20 live poetry readings which I found out about entirely through Facebook. Think about that. I quite enjoy poetry… I have a little click around ‘upcoming events’ and find that there is a poetry reading going on within an hour of my house tonight. I go there, meet some interesting people, maybe buy a book or two. Thanks facebook!

Debates:

Roddy Lumsden is particularly good at sparking these off with his status updates… he is known to get people from all over the country throwing in their 2-pence about the publishing industry, review-writing, autism, music, religion and sex-education. These long, often argumentative, threads between large groups of people from poetry-world are one of the greatest illustrations of what Facebook can be good for… to get people thinking.

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Are you radioactive, pal?

A couple of years ago I managed to get my hands on a copy of a recording of John Berryman and Robert Lowell reading together. To this day it is one of the most listened to things on my iPod. Berryman really knew how to read his poetry out loud. He knew that your audience needs it nice and slow. And honest. Not a whiff of that god-awful 'poetry voice' you hear so many others doing... JB's the real deal.

If only there were more footage of him. Still, we have to be grateful for the ready availability of this interview with Al Alvarez, and this superb reading of one of the Dream Songs.

Most disturbing and beautiful of all, however, is this superb hour-long interview with a semi-coherant Berryman:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

There is also this series of audio recordings:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

EDIT... 31st July 17:07

Any creative writing students, or indeed anyone interested in Lowell and/or Berryman will find this interview with Philip Levine fascinating... he discusses the two poets' style of teaching creative writing. I get the impression he preferred Berryman.