Tuesday, October 09, 2007
One of the tests of a reading – or perhaps I should say of a reading audience – is laughter. Whenever I read, I’m conscious, possibly hyperconscious, of just how the audience reacts to certain lines or phrases. There are some lines that I can be certain will get a laugh in the right towns – New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore or DC – but which might get no response at all if I’m reading on some college campus. It’s not that students at colleges don’t get jokes, or that they don’t have the depth as readers that audiences of mostly poets will have in cities, so much as it seems to be that some schools have kept it a secret that it’s okay for literature to have humor, be funny even. Would my parents be paying this much tuition for me to study something that makes me laugh? Who, one wonders, is responsible for giving students permission to actually feel at ease with writing? One of the great values of works like Ulysses or Tristram Shandy is that they do just that.
The audience at Mills was perfect, picking up on the humor from the very first line. This audience, tho, was filled with poets & Mills itself has taken an interesting turn in recent years hiring several good poets (currently Leslie Scalapino, Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young & Stephen Ratcliffe) to teach at the same time. In short, it was as well read an audience as one could ever hope to have. When I got to the end of the sixth paragraph/line of Ketjak and read
Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.
the audience responded with laughter. In a work full of “arbitrary” juxtapositions, ones such as this do indeed occur.
In
At both events, I followed my excerpt from Ketjak by jumping around in The Chinese Notebook. One paragraph that I read in both locales (there was maybe only 50 percent overlap) was
55. The presumption is: I can write like this and “get away with it.”
I was really pleased in
Humor is not the only thing going on in my poetry, but it is the one aspect for which there is a clear verbal cue from an audience that it gets it. I have no way of knowing that an audience that either doesn’t get my humor (or doesn’t find it funny) gets anything else either. So I tend to think that a laughing audience is a more serious one. Thus when I read a response, such as the collaboration between SOU students Lacey Hunter & Nichole Hermance, that itself has some humor, I take this as a good sign indeed.
"The audience at Mills was perfect, picking up on the humor from the very first line."
I hope your not being literal here. First, I was in the audience, and I assure you, I ain't perfect.
And I don't remember hearing any evidence of funny bones being tickled by the first line of Ketjak. For all its energy, "Revolving door" can't really be considered a laugh line.
But I am being nit-picky here. I sense what you're getting at, I think. Underlying your dead serious "attention is all" focus is a giddy delight in the wild juxta-tactic and para-position of the details of this world.
I can't speak for others who were at Mills, but I enjoy that sensibility, and that's part of what I enjoy in Ketjak so much.
The "fleshy babies . . . we ate them" juxtaposition is of course going to spark laughs in most audiences. Those sentences are funny not only because of the 'arbitrary" juxtaposition of the two lines, but because of their Swiftian black humor. They get funnier still when the "tawny port" (as in wine) gets added in a subsequent paragraph.
I don't get the linked Lacey Hunter post responding to the Ashland reading. I did check out on her blog her October 3rd post, titled "The New Sentence." That's one sharp paragraph.
It seems like it's only with regard to art that humor and seriousness are seen as mutually exclusive. Laughter means lightness ("l-i-t-e"), or even dismissal. That the listener/viewer is better than the thing laughed at, perhaps.
In everyday life, of course, the funny and the serious (or thought-provoking) happen together all the time. Strange that people aren't as ready for complex emotions in poetry, music, theater, film.
I often crack up at "new music" concerts, sometimes during pieces that seem to open some kind of existential chasm. Usually it's an expression of surprise (which is often "funny") ("that juxtaposition?"), or delight that such a sound could exist. Usually at least a couple of people near me in the audience stare. Same deal with readings. Lou & Peter's songs work in a different direction; they're often billed as a "comedy" act (and their stuff is hilarious), but many of the songs move me to tears.
Maybe there is, at times, a problem of socialization; if you don't understand something completely, that's supposed to be bad, rather than thrilling. The social demeanor that best hides that lack of comprehension is the serious face.
Though the panda face surpasses the serious one entirely, and is funny and haunting at the same time.
Humor, per se, isn't a very good measure of the effect of a work of writing. People can be made to laugh by comedians utterly without redeeming literary virtues. I can think offhand of a dozen professional comedians who invariably get me chuckling, but whose work does not rise to the "literary."
A quiet audience may be responding profoundly. And just because a reader may believe his work is delightful and comedic, and smiles and winks and laughs at his own words, doesn't make it funny. It is true that great comedy is inherently serious, and it may be more difficult to write than tragedy. Berrigan always acted as if everything was funny; Anselm Hollo too. That's one way of handling the pressure, but a steady diet of forced humor can get just as tedious as unearned seriousness.
This is part of what makes reading problematic. The work on page is different than the work read in person. We have to put the two together, and I'm not sure that's something that survives the poet (or even the reading, for that matter). Ketjak is still Ketjak, no matter the Author was a brilliant reader or a great deliverer of punchlines. I would distrust any deprecation of a work because it wasn't "humorous" enough.
I can remember readings from the past that were either 1) tediously lighthearted as if everything that was being presented was just squeamishly titillating, when in fact it was meretricious and in poor taste, or 2) odiously ponderous and portentously grave, as if the pretext of the moment (a reading against war, etc.) demanded a deathwatch response or even 3) so hip and jacked-up that everyone was expected to clap and twitch in their seats as if they were at a Baptist sermon.
"panda" shows up on pages 12, 20, 36, 82, and 137 (at least, there may be others) in Tjanting (The Figures, 1981).
dzluvn:
What a trucker gives a lot lizard.
Audience response can mean almost anything, depending on those attending, the circumstance, the occasion, the poet, and the work. The best response any writer can hope for is a single individual poring over the work, considering, weighing, wondering. Audiences are notoriously fickle, impatient, and other-directed.
I would like to hear less about readings and more about the work itself. Readings are performance art--nothing more, nothing less. Dramatic talent helps, but actors are seldom writers--a proof, for me, of what I believe.
Pandas should be the Chinese national mascot. So delete that, Ron.
and as the Chinese have stollen Tibet
so with the pandas..
who are rented out tom the USA (zoos) to sell coffee mugs with "pandas" on them
"made in China"
China wants to subjugate Thibet, and turn it into a huge shopping center for automatons. I guess we can say that without fear of reprisal from the moderator(s).
Yes, to show up in a panda suit at a Conrad reading is to will your annihilation.
I’m surprised that the panda and Steven Fama were in the same room and Steven has no ‘constructive criticism’ for it. “I think it was a good idea, but the proportions were way off. Doesn’t he know how big the heads are compared to the length of the legs? And there was ample room to crawl but he remained a biped going to a poetry reading.”
What about poems that are written more with the page in mind? Do you not like any of those, or would you revise your claim to include the phrase "weaker oral poem?" (or something less clunky)
You may be confused, I think. I was not at the Ashland reading, which was the one attended by the panda. I was struck by the coincidence (?) of a panda appearing at a reading of Ron, and the repeated instances of the word "panda" in Tjanting, so I commented on that.
I was at the Ron's reading at Mills College in Oakland (which took place the night before the Ashland reading). My take on the Mills reading is in the comments for Ron's October 3, 2007 post. As explained in that comment, I was very much struck and inspired by Ron's intensity at Mills.
More generally, thanks for noticing my comments.
The Bamboo Curtain.
Are pandas as gentle as the Dalai Lama? Are pandas Buddhist?
I feel that the ones over here would be better off as Lutheran Surrealists. Perhaps we shall attempt to make some converts. We are an ambiguous movement, perhaps too ambiguous for an animal that is usually presented in black and white. But on the other hand, Ron himself looks a bit like a Panda, and he's not only black and white in his world view, but he's read all over.
Perhaps the Panda is a species that links Maoism and Buddhism, in that we can't tell who is going ot panda to whom.
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