While they're absolutely better preformed than simply read, I don't have a troupe of performers at my disposal, and have managed to miss all the free Shakespeare-in-the-park this summer. When it comes to poetry, I have always preferred to read the verse to myself, whether aloud or silently. Hearing poetry performed (and performing it) to me is too intimate, too imposing on my initial reading of the words, and I get the greedy feeling that "it's all mine! my interpretation! how dare the author ruin it with his own cadence and inflection!". Isn't that funny? I get very caught up in how I hear it in my head, and hearing other readings is very disruptive. (Not that that is negative, I realize how silly of a perspective this is, and I know I could stand to learn a lot from hearing poets interpret works, or authors share their own words in their own words). After all, what is poetry but a descendant of the odes and oral traditions of our ancestors? Since I imagine it predates writing, performance really ought to be familiar.
In addition to seeing poets perform live, youtube and the internet in general have brought performers to the reader. There's a ton to choose from to illustrate the comparison. Here's a video of Charles Bukowski reading his work. It's called The Last Straw and turned out to be the last recording he ever did. According to bukowskilive.com's page for the DVD, he wasn't a fan of doing readings like this. I don't know who authored this page, but they said "In editing this video, the first impulse is to pick out the poems; but in reviewing the piece, it became obvious that the entire reading is solid state. What happens between the poems is not filler. It’s performance art". Before you watch, go ahead and read. The first poem is called Jam:
driving in from the trackI always turn the radio onto the freeway traffic alert station. and the other day I heard the best one,the man said that the Santa Monica freewaynear the San Diego off ramp was congesteddue to an indecent exposure case.
"they're working on getting himoff of there now", he said,"meanwhile, I'd suggest you take an alternate route."
which, of course, nobody did.
Now go watch him read it. His voice is a growl, and he peppers the reading with belches, drags off his cigarette, and pauses. Between pieces, he nettles the audience. I didn't have the benefit of reading first and then watching, but you can definitely get the sense that the piece moves from simply observational, a little laughter at the strangeness of people, to a bit of perverse joy in sharing the suffering of traffic, and seeking out something a little bit crazy. The performance is as much comedy as it is poetry, and adds so much context to just the words themselves (and makes me want a big glass of wine).
Did he write these first, and then later bring them to voice? Or did they evolve out of a set of phrases or something overheard? I don't know much about performance poetry, but it does come from a different place and exist in a different space than "page" poetry. One exists in the air, possibly changing each time it is expressed, and one exists on the space it is printed on, being essentially the same in form but subject to any interpretation of the reader. Apparently there is a bit of a rift between these two styles, I had no idea to what it extent it reached. David Groff addresses this gap in his article The Peril of the Poetry Reading: the Page versus the Performance. He asks if poetry is meant to be a public or a private event, and which way is best to share it and advance its cause given one or the other. Groff comes down on the "page" side (to which I must admit a slight bias myself), and I think you should read the whole thing, but here are some bits I liked:
In his keynote address at the 1996 PEN Literary Awards, Richard Howard offered “a modest proposal that may yet restore an art that was once the glory and the consolation of our race to something like its ulterior status. My proposal is simply this: to make poetry, once again, a secret.” Howard continued, “We have failed…to make poetry known; we have merely made it public. If we are to save poetry, which means if we are to savor it, we must restore poetry to that status of seclusion and even secrecy that characterizes our authentic pleasures and identifies only our intimately valued actions.” For Howard, a poem is an intimate act of communication, not an occasion for a group grope.
Robert Pinsky responded to Howard, asserting that poetry is “part of our shared communal life, as surely as is the Internet.” The participation of poets in the public scene is “part of the civic life of art, a part of the way society held onto the art of poetry, thereby preserving it for the unborn.” Using a distressingly mercantile figure of speech, he avers that poetry is “part of the marketplace where we all gather.” Dana Gioia’s prescription for popularizing poetry through public events goes even further. He says poets should read other poets’ works at readings, include some music and visuals, and in general mix the media, efforts that he believes will “attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.” High school and college poetry teachers, he says, should “spend less time on analysis and more on performance.”
A balance is always good where there is any question of "which is best", but do you have a preference?
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