Poetry as Performance Art

Poetry, with few exceptions, is intended to be read aloud. It is literature and spoken art. Teachers who ask their students to read poems silently to themselves rob their students of the richness and resonance of the poetic experience.

When I was an undergrad at Emporia, my professor for several writing classes, including one soberly titled “Versification,” was Keith Denniston, who taught this lesson by example. My spine tingles still, some forty years later, when I recall his reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” It was made more piquant at the time by the knowledge that Plath had killed herself only two years before the publication in 1965 of Ariel, which contains that powerful autobiographical poem. I attended Denniston’s versification class only a couple of years after that.

We have been fortunate over the past century or so to have access to audio recordings of poets reading their own work and sometimes the poems of others. Not all are great readers. Some read in stilted cadences; others have voices that grate on the ear. But what the listener hears is the real deal, poetry as its author presumably intended.

There are, of course, other poets who are wonderful readers. Last year Maya Angelou, now in her 80s and walking with some difficulty, nonetheless held a capacity crowd in the cavernous, 3,200-seat Indiana University Auditorium spellbound with her resonant reading of her own poetry and some other favorites. Recently I had the pleasure of editing a short essay by Angelou. The task I set myself was to ensure that her distinctive voice resounded from the printed page as clearly as it did across a lectern.

Whenever poetry is read aloud, it becomes multidimensional. The poet’s words are made concrete as nuanced by the reader/speaker. A new poem is thus created each time a work is read. And so there is the reality of an event or a thing, the poetic interpretation of it in text, and the oral interpretation of the reader. All of this is the essence of performance art.

For example, over the past three decades I have visited the memorial at the site of the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. Films and television programs, books and articles, and other experiences, such as touring the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. — all of these have modified that firsthand experience of Dachau. A few months ago I tried to set down an impression distilled from this mishmash of sensory and intellectual input. The result is the poem below.

As the author I would read it aloud in a manner that attempts to convey my intention, my self-interpretation, if you will. Another reader would bring his or her own experiences to my words, interpreting them through his or her own lens, thus creating, in essence, a “new” poem.

Dachau

Weighted by human freight of history in this place,

Shoulders bear the burden, eyes draw downward.

Dust powders shoes under autumn’s leaden sky,

Lowering to compress collective memory: shoes.

So many, many shoes; owners long, long dead.

The iron gate reminds us still: “Arbeit macht frei,”

But can we free ourselves from this grim, gray past?

Ghost barracks count off into seeming infinity,

Years of imprisonment and death, soundless now,

No scream or whimper or footfall or thudding boot.

Now, in faithful humanity, “Hier steh’ ich”:

I survey this sanitized apocalypse and ponder

Human ashes mingled with anonymous dust.

“Ich kann nicht anders.” Like Luther at Wittenberg,

Principles are at stake. I cannot do otherwise.

But look, say you, past is past and doesn’t alter.

I agree. I am neither German nor Jew but only human;

Cannot resurrect those whose ashes powder my shoes.

I can — I must — but wear smudges smeared from ovens

As an ensign: never fully to understand,

But never to forget.