From Rae Armantrout’s Reading:
Last Sunday, Pulitzer prize-winner Rae Armantrout gave a reading at Open Books: The Poetry Emporium (Poets, a spending limit might be in order. This is our casino, minus gold LAMÉ and cocktails).
Here are my Half-Truths and Take Aways from the reading:
Know your reading voice: what you want to sound like, what you actually sound like, what your audience expects you to sound like.
Rae Armantrout’s poetry is sexy, spacious, and littered with fantastic references to the modern consumer. She lets her poems breathe in lots of white with luxurious line breaks. Additionally, she never explains her choices on the page—a talent or a blessing, I’m still not certain. So I expected her performance to certainly be equal parts whimsy, equal parts knife juggling.
Not quite the case: her reading voice was less nymph and more hobbit. The work lost its sexy. Bummertown.
If I had it my way, my reading voice would have the confidence of chainsaws. Every word would be a spondee. I could make trees cry and sap their pants. In reality, I might be able to lullaby a stack of stationary. That’s why I use a tape recorder while practicing—much advised!
If you plan on hashing through a huge body of work, pithy anecdotes will sustain audience engagement. Come up with a few succinct fall-back sentences in order to introduce, transition and justify why you are reading certain pieces alongside others.
Rae has mastered this: everything she said was quirky, slant, and in reference to a personal experience. Nonetheless, I think her reading would have been better if she had shared less.
Volume distracts from the larger ideas. As mentioned before, Rae’s pop references normally sit with adequate space on the page, think billboards few and far between along the country side (Humor me, romantic fantasy). At the reading, these images existed in a clusterf*** city, painfully wedged in between other signage. Aloud, those well-chosen line breaks didn’t receive their well-deserved time.
Communicate your opinions as truths. Biases don’t read well.
Let your ending lines hang for a moment so that the audiences can ‘pleasuregrunt’—what a social phenomenon!
Science makes People, with a capital “P,” less emotional of a topic in poetry. Bulky language will always be the ugly step child to this idea.
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