It’s called by many other names. Spoken Word. Slam jam. “Show” poetry. Performance poetry has its own set of considerations as distinguished from those that apply to what is now called “page poetry” — or that which we’re more familiar with, what we see printed on the page.
In poetry classes, workshop sessions, lectures, I usually point out certain requisites for poetry — page poetry, that is. It’s like a simple list of do’s and don’ts.
One: Don’t declare. If you want to declare anything flat-out, write a letter, an editorial, or an essay. Or an entry in your blog site. If it’s avowals of love you express, don’t just say “I love you.” Metaphorize. Say something like “I love you with the breadth, depth, and height my soul can reach when feeling out of sight.” That way, you extend and thus qualify your “declaration.” Nag-ra-rhyme pa.
Or when you’re bereft because your loved one is leaving you for another, don’t just say: “Okay, introduce him to me please, so I can congratulate him, before I turn away, feeling so sad.” Take the cue from e.e. cummings, who wrote: “If this should be, I say if this should be, let me go unto him, and take his hands, saying, Accept all happiness from me. Then shall I turn my face and hear one bird sing terribly afar in the lost lands.”
That bird is a metaphor, especially since it sings, presumably of loneliness, and does so solo. Where? In the distance. So far. So remotely. Exactly where? In the lost lands.
Again, that is extending, thus enhancing, the emotional import of what would otherwise have been just a declaration — which is often the difference between failed and effective poetry.
Two: Use images that fill up the mental screen of the reader. Imagery provides a graphic quality to the emotions or ideas you share. For the most part, images also stand for something else, and are not just what they basically are. We might say that in a poem, a cigar is not always just a cigar.
Birds can represent the notion of freedom, or of flight, or of song. Cummings’ bird, because it is “one bird” that “sing(s) terribly afar,” represents excruciating loneliness and sorrow.
Three: compare, compare, compare. Use similes, or make parallels between your basic utterances and certain images or actions they can be held similar to, or be symbolized by. When you use “like” or “as” then it’s a simile. If you don’t want to compare that way, then you go aggressive and directly apply the metaphor, to wit: “King James is a lion on the court” instead of “King James is like a lion on the court.” Either would do.
There are many other considerations when writing poetry. Prime among these are still the avoidance of stating anything outright, and the need to be graphically inclined. With the latter, one avoids having too many fat and flabby lines comprised of abstractions, of words that signify too much or stand for something too vague or all-inclusive, like the word “soul.”
A poem must rely on a tangential, elliptical, peripheral approach in articulating — in heightened language — emotions, ideas, experiences, insights, oddments, inklings...
Now, poetry has been evolving in a public manner. It is being/getting democratized. Well and good. More and more young people are taking to expressing themselves “poetically.” Sometimes the stance is enough. That is, by declaring radically fresh notions, one then fulfills the simpler requirements of performed poetry.
Thus, Cesare A.X. Syjuco can recite a “poem” in public that goes: “The value of zero times zero is zero./ The value of one times zero is zero./ The value of two times zero is zero...” And so on. When he completes the multiplication table and ends with a flourish by playing a riff on a harmonica, that is his performed poem.
When you read these same lines from a sheet, it appears as “concrete” poetry, which is what is called poetry that jumps at the eye with typographic features that visually enhance it — such as having a poem about rain composed of lines that are indented with gradating margins, so that the poem appears slanting, to suggest rain.
Gimmickry? Well... Some hardnosed academic critics might say so, the same who would dismiss Jose Garcia Villa’s so-called “comma poems” where each word is simply followed by a comma, as a frivolity that passes away after a season. Unlike, say, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that is all of a solid, variegated suite (a long, sectioned poem) that is also a well-knit compendium of ideas, images, motifs and melodic prosody that gathers up an irresistible centrifugal force. This is why it’s considered a “classic” that’s also suitable to read out loud.
Not all written poetry, or page poetry, lends itself well to oral reading. The more abstruse or complex ideational poem will lose a listener from the word go, unlike Eliot’s “the women come and go...” Sometimes the trick, and trick it is, is to balance the impermeability of a poem with its musicality, as with Villa’s ludic designs on his perennial battle with, or self-proclamation of, divinity.
At readings, it is best to select simple poems that the audience’s collective ear can follow, while they too appreciate the ideas, images and insights that are offered. Or one can conduct shock-jock treatment to ensure captivation, such as reading one’s poem while progressively stuffing one’s mouth with paper until the verbalization is garbled, muffled, rendered unintelligible. Such as what our dynamic young performance artist and performance poet (those are distinct) Angelo Suarez once did at Penguin in Malate.
In fact, that same night, another performer jocked that better, or worse, by reading a poem while having his lips actually sewn up. Ouch. Excruciating to watch, let alone listen to.
Occasionally, this is my beef against performance art or performance poetry, that often it partakers of token or more than token violence. That Gelo also heedlessly threw a shoe into the crowd at Penguin could’ve been an invitation to physical retaliation.
By the by, Gelo just returned from the Ubod Poetry Festival in Bali, where I can only presume he kept his flip-flops on, and yet still thrilled the international audience with his vigor and sense of surrealist empowerment.
All this is by way of lengthily segue-ing into recent poetry readings cum performances that proved exhilarating. The first was the Cesare-led event at the Ateneo Art Gallery, where the first performer was London-based Francesca Beard, whom The British Council Manila brought over for workshop sessions on the Spoken Word.
It wasn’t her first time in Manila. I first heard of her from Vim Nadera, who’s no slouch himself when it comes to entertaining audiences with performed poetry. This time Ms. Beard held an all-day session at UP Diliman where a good number of women signed up. Straight from that first-day session, she joined the Syjuco entourage in Ateneo, but was so tired that she had to go first.
I missed her act, because a televised basketball game caused tardiness on my part. (See, I’m so honest I didn’t blame the traffic.) What I caught was a riveting poetry performance by Trix Syjuco, who also emceed the affair. Her “props” included a chair, black tape that she drew some geometrical shape with on the floor, scissors (Aieee!), and transparent masking tape with which she momentarily sealed the faces of a couple of musicians providing accompaniment, and tied these up with her own.
I can’t recall much of the poem she read; suffice it to say that it had certain “arresting” lines. The same can be said of Yanna Verbo Acosta’s act, which delighted with sheer power of voice and physical stance.
Because one can’t smoke inside galleries, or anywhere at all on the grounds of the Loyola Schools except in the smokers’ pocket gardens that are usually a mile away from anywhere, I sought the solace of my car’s confines (with Jimmy Abad, heh-heh) for an orgy with our lighters. And thus missed what surely was another captivating act, by Maxine Syjuco. Good thing I can always ask her to do it again sometime, since she’s a sister to my godson.
The second gig I caught entire was at Mag:net Katips, with the workshoppers under Francesca Beard joining her in delighting the crowd with an ebullient, occasionally brilliant Spoken Word potpourri, from exercises to games and, well, all-around “gameswomanship.” Oh, a couple of guys held up a fraction of the sky, er, Mag:net’s ceiling: Seige Malvar and Francisco Monteseña — and both were excellent.
The ladies of the night were even more so, all together as well as individually, but it was as a spirited ensemble that they blew the very stage away. Take a bow, now: Maria Abulencia, Yanna Acosta, Alma “Jerri” Anonas-Carpio, Aivie Cabato, Ida Calumpang, Christine Carlos, Digi Ann Castillo, Fer Elido, Josephine Gomez, Karen Kunawicz, Jeena Raru Marquez, Surot Matias, Jen Velarmino and Moki Villegas.
Why, I hadn’t enjoyed myself as much since... uhh, well, I have yet to see Ms. Ansler’s The Vagina Monologues, albeit Ms. Carlos rendered an excerpt from it that night.
Then there was Francesca: light, somber, grave, hellacious, London-lilting, luminous, numinous, invigorating with her Spoken Word pieces — recited, chanted, sung. She was something else. She did several pieces, among them the one she recited in Ateneo, “The Poem that was Really a List,” which starts this way:
“The spade that was really a symbol/ the queen that was really a pawn/ the king that was really a rock-star/ the madman who was really God/ the milkman who was really Dad//... And so forth for nine more stanzas of transfer sequencing, until the last: “the cynic who was really a romantic/ the romantic who was really a sexist/ the sexist who was really a phobic/ the self-sufficiency that was really insecurity/ the love that was really fear/ the fear that was really nothing/ the ending that was really nearly here.”
On the page, would that be a successful poem, despite its reliance on abstractions that were types and stereotypes, or states of mind? I’d say yes, since I read it that way, too, from her 2002 chapbook titled Cheap, which I acquired even cheaper, that is, free, with dedication pa man din.
Exceptions, exemptions rule our lives; so they must... poetry. The types litanized do present images. Besides, irony, surreal undertones and hyper-reality, together with musicality, can combine to hallmark effective poetry.
But here’s another of Ms. Beard’s chapbook poems, this one briefer but more representative of the written poem, although I’m sure she also renders this powerfully as Spoken Word. It’s titled “Power of the Other”:
“This mind crawls like a pregnant cat; like traffic./ I am in love with the scientists./ They use simple sentence structures. Subject, verb, object./ The sun is a star. Fear is an instinct. The heart is an organ./ Each word is a molecule, the link in a chain, a single step along a/ winding mountain path — at the end you look back and see a brave/ new word, a glimmering landscape smiling shyly beneath you./ The scientists are neither charmed nor terrorised./ The scientists are radiant with patience./ They walk calmly, through the woods, through the trees.”
Dig those similes, the detours, sly curvature of an elliptical playground where contrapuntal images don’t exactly collide but relate in a magical way, in a paradox of parallel universes.
Francesca took her training session to Baguio, where she and her workshoppers (teachers and students of UP Baguio, Saint Louis University, Philippine Military Academy, University of Baguio and the University of the Cordilleras) performed at Kidlat Tahimik’s Oh My Gulay restaurant/café/bar (cum theater and art center). This they did till the wee hours of the morning.
Performance poetry goes places. Earthwards, heavenwards. Round the clock it goes, rounding up and rounding off erstwhile straight-jacketed poetry. Betcha by golly wow, oh my gulay, vive le difference and hooray!