Performing Poetry Project
Dr. Alex Runchman, Trinity College Dublin
The young Ezra Pound – precocious, bohemian, irate – might have enjoyed reading in the Georgian settings of the James Joyce Centre. Resembling a patron’s living room, and soaked in dewy light, the museum’s second floor gallery lent an air of sophistication to the first event of the Performing Poetry Project. The provision of mushroom risotto and homebrewed cider added to the refinement, while the sense of occasion was further heightened by the ticketed invites and impressive turn-out: for a performance by three as yet largely unheralded poets and a small trad-folk-jazz outfit, the fifty-odd in attendance amounted to a smash.
The Performing Poetry Project is a wonderful enterprise. Dublin’s poets – and audiences for poetry – need the kind of forum that Jonathan Creasy and Eimear Fallon are striving to create, one which embraces experimentation, encourages writers to showcase their work, and insists that poets do not need to choose between the torpor of the institution and the anything-goes raving that constitutes your best chance of winning at your average poetry slam. By taking both the writerly and performative aspects of poetry seriously, PPP is embracing the possibility of bridging divisions between the academy and a wider public. And, as Creasy reminded us at the start (in the words of Thelonius Monk), ‘If you can’t hear it there ain’t no use telling anyone about it’
It’s important to state how admirable the project’s goals are at the outset because I had reservations about each of the performances. So long as we regard them as works in progress rather than the finished article this needn’t be a problem; in fact, the real potential of the Performing Poetry Project is to generate sympathetic but honest discussion of the works that are shared. It would, in fact, be a valuable development to expand the project to incorporate workshops and reading groups so that experimentation can be further encouraged.
Rory McArdle was the first poet to read. Several of his poems are centrally concerned with the acts of listening and recording: ‘His face turns when / field recorder clicks, // chirps, graces’ began his opener, ‘Listening for Source’ (that field work an open nod to Heaney). The poem captures a character as he attempts to make a sound recording of the river Ow, although the character is really standing in for the poet himself: ‘field recorder mere metaphor’ we are informed towards the end. This poem set the tone for a series of pieces that attempt to create a mythology of the Wicklow landscape and the River Ow in a manner something akin, I suppose, to what Alice Oswald achieves in Dart. McArdle’s local colour, characters and rhythms aren’t yet as various as Oswald’s, and he can’t yet compete with her mesmeric incantations in performance. His poems sounded too alike, too steady-paced – an effect furthered by the fact that McArdle offered more of a straight reading than a performance as such. All the same, bringing these formal poems on rural topics to the stage suggested an interesting melding of the traditional and the avant-garde.
Jonathan Creasy, meanwhile, consciously fashions himself as a ‘California poet’, courting the company of ‘Jeffers, Blaser, Spicer, Duncan &c’ . A jazz musician as well as a writer, he regularly riffs on musical motifs and has a sensitive ear, composing, as Pound would say, in the sequence of the musical phrase. Many of his poems are acts of homage to literary and musical heroes: ‘tonight O’Hara smiles / & Monk plays Duke – / so sweetly’. And of those California poets he writes: ‘Living calls up their image, their voices in dreams, / & cannot bury them’. As with McArdle, however, it was not always easy to distinguish one poem from another when read. As yet, he lacks the performative brio of the poets he so admires. Creasy and McArdle both have promise, but as yet their endeavours sometimes feel a bit too earnest, as though they were each, in the end, trying too hard to achieve real panache. But they also have real literary models and through imitation and emulation they are each in the process of finding their own authentic voices.
Of the three performers, Kit Fryatt was the most established, recent winner of The Stinging Fly’s best poem award, director of her own small press and impresario of wurm im apfel, an esoteric poetry night that she has now taken with her to Aberdeen. A core of wurm im apfel faithful were there on Thursday to hear Fryatt’s self-confessedly ‘narcissistic psychodrama’. Black-hatted, black-lipsticked, and sporting a black Kiss My Kunst T-Shirt and silver DMs, Fryatt was determined to play up the performance. Beginning with a histrionic canticle she progressed through poems about meat- packing, the deteriorating standards of Dublin buskers, and one sending up academics in the work place. Fryatt’s gift is a feel for the physical heft of words: ‘the dwarf leprechaun / swithers on his kapok / bum – his panstick / is No. 7 # 0008, dung – ’. But I’m not sure she knows what kind of poet she wants to be: a twenty-first century female troubadour or a mouthy soapbox? The performer and the writer don’t yet seem to have made peace.
A short set by Leafzang – Patrick Groenland on guitar and Clara Grimes on violin and vocals, with an impressive vocal guest performance by Georgia Cusack – rounded off the evening. The music seemed more assured than the poetry, but this in itself was a gauge of just how necessary the work of PPP is: give more poets the stage, enable them to become more confident and accomplished performers, and let them complement the music of instruments with the music of words.