Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading
236
Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading
236Overview
By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling between the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one centered on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams—all of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who were inveterate professional readers in the sixties—expose this struggle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings could be. By discussing how to "hear" as well as "read" poetry, Bodies on the Line offers startling new vantage points from which to understand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609383046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2014 |
| Series: | Contemp North American Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 236 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Bodies on the Line
Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading
By Raphael Allison
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2014 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-304-6
CHAPTER 1
The Antinomies of Sixties Reading
Allen and John
Of all sixties poets, perhaps Allen Ginsberg lays the greatest original claim to a poetics of presence, immediacy, and physical thereness—and that is how his legacy is still articulated. At the end of Voicing American Poetry (2008), Lesley Wheeler claims that Ginsberg's reading at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1965—an event that constituted "a warning about distancing technologies and a celebration of embodied voices"—indicates "what embodied voices have the potential to do: create community through ritual, inspire peace, call audiences to arms in a sensual rather than a military way" (166). Likewise, in his chapter on Beat performance in American Poetry in Performance (2011), Tyler Hoffman reads Ginsberg as a poet of physical immediacy, citing the "presence associated with [Ginsberg's] live performance" (139), and he writes of Ginsberg's famous Six Gallery reading on October 13, 1955: "What impressed many in the audience at the Six Gallery that October night was the 'insurgent' political power of the spoken word and the body behind it" (129). Ginsberg's most celebrated poem does indeed prefigure its relationship to live speech repeatedly, with his ecstatic "best minds" (Collected 126) who "talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue," "yacketayakking screaming," who "wailed down Wall" (127) and, with more libidinal thrust, "howled on their knees" and "screamed with joy" (128). Conversely, silence is linked with humiliation: the "who" of part 1 stands at the end, "speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame" (130).
Ginsberg was convinced of the necessity of the live voice and breath for performance and composition. Voice often served as a poem's starting or was figured as the spark for formal structures. Ginsberg claimed in "Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl" that his great poem "developed out of an extreme rhapsodic wail I once heard in a madhouse" (Deliberate 231) and had lines structured around "a single breath unit" (230). In "Abstraction in Poetry," Ginsberg notes how Kerouac's prose in Visions of Cody sometimes found its start in "actual recorded tape conversations" that were later transcribed and revised (Deliberate 243). For Ginsberg, performance or articulation of the poem as actual speech was elemental and crucial. In a postscript penciled on a 1955 letter to William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg instructs even his mentor poet (who was ironically suffering from increasing expressive aphasia at the time) that his poems "are best & clearest read aloud" (Howl Facsimile 150). Live reading seemed to offer Ginsberg the chance to leap from print to create community through a ritual of "ecstatic" speech where performance was prior to written text. In a studio-made recording at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in 1956, Ginsberg cautioned future listeners that they were missing a crucial element of the poem—its "ecstatic" "transmission":
The way it should be read is, um, with people or in front of people, the way I, I have been reading it recently, this way, except I've read it too much and so the heart has gone out of me for reading it. However, the way it should be read is, um, kind of ecstatically, if possible, but it would take ecstasy to read it. Uh, what I'm going to do is read it quietly and give it, uh, give it a, uh, silent chance, and then if I can work up into any kind of, of real rhythm I'll try to deliver that, which I would like to do, but it's very difficult to do because it requires a certain kind of openness on my part [pause] and a sense of openness on the audience part too, actually, for a transmission, really.
Ginsberg reads the version of Howl that follows this caveat well, and the second section builds into a stirring peroration, though some of Ginsberg's live performances are indeed suffused with much greater sense of rollicking, engulfing presence not captured in this canned recording.
Ironically, much of Ginsberg's fame and reputation as a live reader stem from an unrecorded performance, the Six Gallery reading of Howl in San Francisco, held on October 7, 1955, almost precisely a year before the Poetry Center recording. This means that Howl's first and most indelible incarnation was also its most significant form of publication to date. The first draft was written in early August of that year and revised heavily up to the Six Gallery reading, and what Ginsberg brought to that event would undergo more revising before actually being published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights press a year later. Despite or because of its status as a work in progress, accounts of this reading often emphasize the sense of momentous change it generated, often noting a "surprise" that indicates a new and unregulated force. Writing about the Six Gallery readers in the third person (and with characteristic immodesty) in an article coauthored with Gregory Corso, Ginsberg reported that the reading as a whole was "a violent and beautiful expression of their revolutionary individuality ... conducted with such surprising abandon and delight by the poets themselves ... that the audience ... was left stunned" (Deliberate 240). "The reading was delivered by the poet," Ginsberg writes about his own performance of Howl, "rather surprised at his own power, drunk on the platform, becoming increasingly sober as he read, driving forward with a strange ecstatic intensity" (Deliberate 241). In his memoir Scratching the Beat Surface (1994), Michael McClure claims that the Six was a transformative event of "wonder" in which Ginsberg's physical voice and body sped forth a larger sense of social upheaval:
Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting "GO" in cadence as Allen read it. In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before.... Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases. (168)
Wonderment, surprise, astonishment, transformation: for Ginsberg and his circle, reading equated to authenticity and the power of physical presence of body and voice.
Later recordings bear this out, and one in particular—the Big Table Reading in 1959 in Chicago—has Ginsberg declaiming Howl in a peremptory style that is truly affecting. His voice is pitched high and cleaves, during the entire reading, which lasts over twenty minutes, to this somber, measured, vatic tone. Yet he also modulates his voice carefully, taking measure of the poem's underlying movements of feeling, which build over the three parts in a slow crescendo. Sometimes, phrases are emphasized with staccato syllables, as when he spits out rapid-fire, "until the noise of wheels and children brought / them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain / all drained of brilliance." Other passages are given wailing emphasis, as when he truly howls the final word in the phrase "shocks of hospitals and jails and wars," or in part 2, when he declaims his lines on Moloch with implosive force, almost crying the words in deliberative accusation. The exclamation "monstrous bombs!" is shouted. Part 3 is saturated with an accrued sense of emotional weight, especially in the line "O skinny legions run outside O starry / spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is / here." All of this emphatic, oracular power is underscored by tiny, but telling, edits: Ginsberg cuts the phrase "this actually happened" from an anecdote about someone who leapt from the Brooklyn Bridge ("who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked / away unknown and forgotten" [Complete 129]), as if his presence alone is sufficient to verify the story's truth; and he elides the word "here" in one line from part 1 ("putting down here / what might be left to say in time come after death" [131]), again as if the deictic "here" of the page has been supplanted by the "here" of the room. Minus the audience's few careful coughs and complicit chucklings—at the lines about throwing potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism, for example, or at the comic list "occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia"—all of this resounds in a room that is silent, attentive, and wildly enthusiastic in its final applause.
And yet other recordings of Howl tell a different story. Perhaps most striking is an abbreviated performance of the poem from the Vancouver Poetry Conference recorded in the summer of 1963. Comparing the Big Table and Vancouver readings is shocking. Ginsberg's voice in Vancouver is deflated, flat, and almost querulous. He moves sequentially through his poems, reading in a bored, laconic mumble. He introduces Howl as a mere chronological inevitability: "The next on that, in that series is Howl. That's kind of long for me." There is laughter, then Ginsberg asks for the time and says, "I'll read it until I get bugged or bored." This version of Howl begins softly, as if punctured and lacking sufficient air. His voice is slow, enunciating, dry, and plodding, and when he gets to the end of line 5 ("tenement roofs illuminated") he simply cuts off and says, "Actually I don't want to read that, I don't see why I should. Fuck you. Yeah, hung up on that. I was just trying to be nice." The entire episode runs less than two minutes.
A later reading of Howl in San Francisco in 1971 at the Intersection for the Arts is neither oracular nor deflated. It's lively, comic, edited (possibly spontaneously), interspersed with comments from Ginsberg and laughter from the audience. Compared to the Big Table performance, it's also tonally polyvalent. His voice begins with energy and force, though soon, small substitutions for phrases can be heard, some of them seemingly references to location. The line "burning their money in / wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall" (Collected 126) becomes "burning their money in wastebaskets amid the rubbish of memorable Berkeley manifestoes listening to the terror through the wall." An attentive listener soon notices that sizable chunks of the poem are simply excised, that some lines are read in jumbled order, that many small changes to the City Lights version are peppered throughout the reading. Sometimes, Ginsberg stops abruptly to proffer a comment, as when he says of one line ("who chained themselves to subways" [126]) that "the principle of a line like that is to go from A to Z in rhythm," or when he explains the line ending "seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels" (127) is really "the center perception of the whole poem." As the poem moves forward, the audience can be heard laughing more, as if authorized by the reader himself, who increasingly shifts into a clownish mode. The words "incomprehensible leaflets" (127), referring to counterculture literature being snooped by the FBI, is read hilariously, the fourth syllable of "incomprehensible" given a gouging emphasis, as if to embody for a moment a noninitiate's description of protest literature. Because of blue laws prohibiting vulgar public speech (Hoffman, American 133), the poem's many obscenities are redacted by the word "censored," which Ginsberg clearly uses for comic emphasis; thus "blew and were blown" becomes "censored and were censored." In the long passage beginning "who copulated ecstatic and insatiate," the many intrusions of the word "censored" are funny, and Ginsberg's loopy, reeling enunciation suggests how far from a Big Table-style, hieratic reading of the poem we are.
Tyler Hoffman, who has written the only full-scale interpretive analysis of Ginsberg's live readings, argues repeatedly that Ginsberg's style of "Beat performance" was "freewheeling, improvisatory, and dialogic" and that his "humane vocal presence" was achieved in unregulated and ecstatic moments of live reading (American 127). This perspective is not unlike Ginsberg's self-descriptions or his traditional reception. Referring to the poet's self-interruptions and comic twists, Hoffman says Ginsberg was dialogic in Bakhtin's sense of the word, erupting in "mockery," acts of "discrowning," and "spectacles of inversion that expose the unstable and temporary nature of any hierarchy" (134). It's worth questioning this judgment with some care. First, is Ginsberg's performance polyvalent and heteroglossic, as Hoffman suggests, or does it in fact erode the authority of spoken poetry that he demonstrated elsewhere? Hoffman himself notes Paul Blackburn's article in Big Table (the magazine that sponsored Ginsberg's 1959 reading), in which Blackburn distinguishes between "drunken directness" and "drunken playing for cheap laughs" and says that in one recording, Ginsberg pandered to the crowd and debased his poem (133). And yet by listening across readings, can't we hear a little Adam in Ginsberg's Tomás? Inserting local place-names to titillate an audience is a tactic more typically associated with rock bands on tour in Cleveland; interrupting the flow of the poem with comments and jokes casts the high-flown, declamatory, prophetic voice into relief as a performed voice by contrast, robbing it of any claim to authentic presence.
I don't claim here that such deviations from a more singular "ecstatic" reading of the poem are more or less meaningful than others, but I do claim that they suggest—through serial listening—that the image of Ginsberg as a poet of endless, heroic public power is a limited framework of reception. Is it possible that Ginsberg's fluctuations as a reader have less to do with dialogism or bad humor and more to do with a subterranean resistance to live reading? "I have quit reading in front of live audiences for a while" (Deliberate 231), Ginsberg wrote in 1959, burned out before even the starter's pistol kicked off the sixties heyday. "[I]t's become more a trap and duty than the spontaneous ball it was first" (231). Yet if we imagine the poetry reading as a crucible of live "transmission," as Ginsberg so often urged us to, we miss a crucial point: that along with Ginsberg, preeminent poet of directness, immediacy, presence, authenticity, and embodied liveness, sixties poets actually resist such an ethos. As much as live reading was courted by poets of the sixties—even the most oracular among them—it was also forsworn. A skeptical counterforce to humanist sixties reading was audible in the Dharma Lion himself.
Yet if performer-readers like Ginsberg were touched by the antinomies of sixties reading, others were more fully committed to a style in which presence was not only out of fashion (or perhaps not yet in fashion) but studiously avoided. The New York School poet John Ashbery will serve as one example—appropriately so, if we key his style to Lerner's Adam Gordon. Ashbery engages in what might be termed "metareading," a style that, unlike the wailing reverberations of Ginsberg, puts distance between voice and poem and from the reader's or listener's own relationship to it. This is accomplished both through tone of voice and simple, directive comments. For example, Ashbery introduces his poem "To a Waterfowl" at a reading at the Living Theatre in New York on September 16, 1963, by foregrounding its genre, which is itself significant: the poem is a cento, an Italian found-poem form that collages lines from other poems into a cobbled new lyric (the title itself is taken from William Cullen Bryant's heavily anthologized lyric). Ashbery's note to the audience that "I hadn't known this when I wrote it," however, suggests his remoteness from what has come to be the poem's formal logic, which is itself an act of bricolage, of stripping the poem's genesis of its own originality; his words serve as a framing device that cools the poem down by suggesting the poet's own belatedness of enterprise. More significant is Ashbery's form of reading, which, unlike Ginsberg's, lacks inflection or dynamic vocal range. He says virtually nothing before or after poems (the previous comments are all the gloss we get in the Living Theatre reading, which lasts close to an hour), and his voice's flatness and freedom from affective pitch are remarkable—almost a performance of nonperformance. While it's hard not to hear Ashbery practically straining to steer clear of the semiotics of emotion, in a 1999 interview with Daniel Kane, Ashbery frames his experience as a reader after returning from Paris in the early 1960s as unpracticed amateurism. In fact, his reading at the Living Theatre marked Ashbery's American return, as Kenneth Koch makes clear at the outset of his introduction to Ashbery that evening. Ashbery tells Kane, "When I left [America for Paris], poetry readings were solemn and official events given by elder statespersons of poetry, like Auden or Eliot and Marianne Moore. Then the 'Beat revolution' happened to take place while I was away, and and when I got back—although I wasn't aware of it—everyone was giving poetry readings everywhere. I was astonished at being asked to give one, until I realized I was one of about a hundred poets one could have heard that night in New York" (xvii). Obviously not a part of Ginsberg's "revolution"—which Ashbery associates here most generally with performative reading—the poet's self-image is still, decades later, that of the wide-eyed outsider entirely unskilled at live reading. And it shows. His readings at the Washington Square Art Gallery on August 23, 1964, and his performance on March 27, 1967, at the YM-YWHA reveal a voice indistinguishable from the Living Theatre reading in almost every way. Their uniformity testifies to the lack of occasion readings seemed to offer Ashbery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bodies on the Line by Raphael Allison. Copyright © 2014 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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