|
poetry beat : john beer
"Talking About the Talk Poem"
A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday May 2 at Myopic Books
Beer begins the "talk" by playing a recording of a woman reading a passage from Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia
This goes on for some time, Beer remaining silent. He is eventually "interrupted" by an audience member, who begins to harangue Beer for dragging us out to listen to a pre-recorded passage taken from "a seventeen-year-old movie" in an uncomfortable basement during a time-slot when we could be watching The Simpsons. It's clear from the get-go that the audience member is a plant (he is reading from a script). He raises some points that he would have hoped the talk would touch on (the relationship between David Antin and the New American Theatre from which Gray emerged; whether the talk poem is, in fact, a recent phenomenon, etc.)
This audience member is, in turn, interrupted by a third (Kerri Sonnenberg, one of the organizers of the Discrete Series) who critiques the conceit of a performer organizing the disruption of his own performance as a "tired Andy Kaufman routine"—referencing instances in which Bob Zmuda would disrupt Kaufman's performances.
She, in turn, is interrupted by another audience plant. (After each plant is done speaking, Beer leads them over to a row of seats set up to his left, designated as the "Peanut Gallery" by a sign on an easel.)
The new speaker (the third, not counting Beer, who has still not spoken), discusses a seminar he took with Bob Perelman, and a conversation that grew out of that seminar, about Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," allegedly a transcrition of a poem that Ginsberg narrated spontaneously into a tape recorder on a drive.
This speaker raises some questions: how much of our appreciation of this poem depends on whether we believe Ginsberg's claim? Does the claim add an additional (conceptual) dimension to Ginsberg's poem? A time dimension? How does our understanding of the poem change when we understand it as an event in "real time," or what Ginsberg might consider to be "sacred time?"
"integrating speech into poems is not new to Antin"—the whole tradition of the lyrical ballad, for instance, implies a voice. Poets interested in "everyday speech" include Williams (and the Beats, and Creeley), but also individual poets that fall outside of that lineage, such as Eliot or Lowell.
This speaker is in turn interrupted by a fourth speaker, who discusses what superhero she would be if she were a superhero (possible candidates: Speed Racer, Wittgenstein, and the metamorph from Space : 1999)
She is interrupted by a fifth speaker: "If I were a superhero I'd be Judas"
The fourth and fifth speakers trade back and forth, and the evening shifts from being a chain of interrupted monologes into something more dialogic. Once all five are seated in the Peanut Gallery the role of speaker begins to alternate between them. They touch on a variety of topics, such as Robert Bly (in particular his notion of "passing the stick," but the discussion on him leans more towards critique, as a purveyor of "counterfeit ritual"). At times the "talk" begins to resemble a disjunctive modern poem, particularly in a sequence where each of the speakers issue a statement that follows the form "When I think of [x] I think of [y]." Notably, the entire "talk" to date can be distinguished from one of Antin's by the fact that it's entirely scripted—all of the performers are reading, none (as near as I can tell) are improvising
Eventually Beer (who continues to sit, silently, at the front of the room) plays a second recording, a male speaker this time (Beer himself?). The voice tells a few stories and eventually once again brings up the names of the three artists who have figured heavily in the evening's performance from the outset: Antin, Kaufman, and Gray. The speaker praises them (Gray and Kaufman particularly) for their willingness to confront an audience with something that's hard to make sense of or something that's "terrifyingly open." The easel at this point designates the talk as being "for Spalding Gray"
At some point during this recording, Beer leaves the stage—I begin to wonder whether this is the way he has chosen to end the performance. But he returns with an acoustic guitar [!], and performs a rendition of the Vaselines' "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam" (in the style of Cobain's version).
Final easel card: "Tenk You Veddy Much" |
