My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

286 c LOS EllS TEN I N G
can be understood as a metaphor for the performer of poetry: "patterning
many different ways" (49-50) and also "with many resoundings" (39).
Nagy quotes Alfred Lord's study of Homer, The Singer oj Tales:
Our real difficulty arises from the fact that, unlike the oral poet, we
are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity. We find it difficult
to grasp something that is multiform. It seems ideal to us to construct
an ideal text or to seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied
with an ever-changing phenomenon. I believe that once we know the
facts of oral composition we must cease to find an original of any traditional
song. From an oral point of view each performance is original.7
The poetry reading, considered along with typographic, holographic,
and contextual variants, modulates and deepens what McGann calls the
"textual condition". The poetry reading extends the patterning of poetry
into another dimension, adding another semantic layer to the poem's multiformity.
The effect is to create a space of authorial resistance to textual
authority. For while writing is normally-if reductive1y and counterproductively8-viewed
as stabilizing and fixing oral poetic traditions, authorial
poetry readings are best understood as destabilizing, by making more
fluid and pluriform, an aural (post-written) poetic practice. And here the
double sense of reading is acutely relevant. For in realizing, by supplementing,
the semantic possibilities of the poem in a reading, the poet
encourages readers to perform the poem on their own, a performance that
is allowed greater latitude depending on how reading-centered the poem
is-that is, how much the poem allows for the active participation of the
reader (in both senses) in the constitution of the poem's meaning.
I am proposing that we look at the poetry reading not as a secondary extension
of "priOr" written texts but as its own medium. What, then, are the characteristics
specific to this medium and what can it do that other live performance
media-instrumental music, song and opera, theater--cannot?
The answer may be found in what seems to many the profoundly anti-performative
nature of the poetry reading: the poetry reading as radically "poor
theater" in Jerzy Grotowski's sense. If that is true, it may show how what
some find as the most problematic aspect of the poetry reading may turn out
to be its essence: that is, its lack of spectacle, drama, and dynamic range, as
exemplified especially in a certain minimal-anti-expressivist-mode of
7. Ibid., p. 9, his emphasis. Quoted from Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1960), p. 100.
8. This qualification is in response to a comment by Dennis Tedlock on this passage. Tedlock
emphasizes that writing is also a performance and as such readily open to variation and
revision.