My questions are very basic this week. I feel like I have so many broad questions at the start of the semester when we’re still trying to define the key terms we’re working with. I hope I find myself asking more specific questions as the semester progresses. In a nutshell, Question 1 lead me to many other questions, as you will see. Therefore, I’m leaving all of those unanswered. As for Question 2, it is one that was continuously in the back of my mind during the first set of listening and reading assignments, and I feel like it also could lead me to additional questions. Here they are…
Question 1: Does reading a poem while listening to it take away from the experience?
I couldn’t help but read the Tennyson on the webpage as the audio was playing, and I felt like I was paying too much attention with my eyes, and not listening closely enough. It makes me wonder: Does reading a poem while listening to it take away from the experience of hearing the reading? Or, does the hearing interfere with our reading? Questions of authority always interest me. Could hearing/seeing a reading implant images and sounds in our minds that take away our authority as readers by providing too strict of impressions? So when we read more poems by the same author, we’ll hear that voice in our heads. Who is the writing/reading for? Does it matter? Is it important to recognize the author’s intention in writing the poem? Not having written too much poetry, I wonder about the composing processes of poets. Do the poets read their ideas aloud as they write, as if the words are to be read later. Or, do they hear the ideas in their heads and write them as if they are to be read silently. Does it matter?
Question 2: What is a good reading? A good performance? For them to be good, must we gain knowledge, find entertainment, or be provoked?
The readings and the listening for today made me reflect on the poetry and literature readings I have heard. Sometimes they seemed like mere readings – not much emotion, not much eye contact with the audience, not much energy. However, others have seemed like pure entertainment where the readers’/authors’ energy emits to the audience.
In the sound clip of Langston Hughes, in between Langston’s three poems, you can hear him thinking/speaking about how the problems of Jim Crow laws and segregation are left behind in northern cities and listen to his reasoning for reading the poem “Graduation” about the girl from Chicago. I feel like we get a sense of Hughes’s thought process and personality in these in between sections, gaining insight about the author. Likewise, in the Robert Johnson You Tube clip, it’s nice that we get to visualize who is singing. Like a reading, the audience is able to put a face with the words on the page or the words/music being heard.
During visual performances, we can also see how the performers get into their work or not. With some, that helps. Energetic performance can be emotional, affective. With others, the performance ruins the music…it makes a distracting kind of noise, if we can think of noise as the noise that occurs in our minds, disrupting our focus and soiling our appreciation. For me, some examples are Celine Dion, Beyonce, and Kanye West. I will listen to some of their music and enjoy it, but when I see them perform, I cannot appreciate the music (perhaps unless I shut my eyes). Though I use singers as opposed to poets as examples, Rothenberg notes that performance (of poetry and I’m assuming otherwise) can be “an art of sound and gesture” (6). In which case, I think the visual and auditory elements of the performance are equally important and help make one successful. However, performance, like any written text, is up for interpretation by the audience. I am a fan of Bob Dylan, after all, and have attended and enjoyed 8 of his concerts even though many people believe his voice sounds awful now. However, when it comes to him, I think it’s more about the words and the legend than it is how well Dylan’s voice sounds. Rothenberg mentioned Dylan as one of the musicians whose music was language-centered in the 60s and 70s (5), he’s been referred to as a poet laureate of America and of Rock ‘n Roll. I’ll probably find another way to discuss Dylan later, but I’m still left with the question of what makes a good performance. Is there a standard? For some audience members, distracting or uninspired performances may not be considered good. Performing has been around for an extremely long time through the use of oral tradition to share stories, poems, and songs before print capabilities developed. What made one of these storytellers effective? Does it end up being about what entertains us? The questions could go on…
