Dramaturgy, Fringe, reflections, blahblahblahisms

John Walsh sees the “emancipatory interest” of unmasking “dramaturgical society” for its “fraudulent or repressive character”. The “thing-in-itself reality” of an object can be mystified by its “phenomenal presentation”.

The default presentation of poetry is from the lectern. This is a phenomenal presentation of Protestant piety. Poets at readings are largely consigned to the role of Anglican priests, gently entertaining their flock. Invariably, people are sitting. Invariably, the poet does not know their work off by heart.

In the “Prologue” of God’s Gift to Women, Don Paterson mocks these conventions richly, and the general tone of poetry readings. We’re at a poetry reading, we proudly announce to ourselves. They become enlightened opportunities to show we “get the clever stuff”. They become boringly fraudulent activities, where we finally put to use the expensive literary training (either financially or temporally) by a network of sighs and snorts.

Elsewhere, Paterson also mocks these conventions, beautifully, in 40 Sonnets. Poets are sorcerers, magicians, encouraged to talk in the gaps of their poems but certainly not actually read them. “Anything but read your poem”, the audience is imagined to demand. Legend has it that Paterson became so bored of readings that he no longer does it.

I thought I could upend the whole customs of poetry readings. But what are the alternatives? And are we ready for them?

The griot – the troubadour-historian, for example – retells, in verse, the history of the people. Can we be this? Can we train ourselves to do this?

In a culture obsessed with specialisation, perhaps not? Is there a market for a good griot?

We are shamefully aware, for example, that peppering our cryptic verse (for our verse is cryptic if it is mysterious to… the people….. the pub… the crowd at Spoons… the guy under the bridge…) with musical interludes exposes our incompetence. In a culture where “to sing well” is to be able to shoot dopamine into someone’s face, the kind of light, lilting singing that inevitably accompanied an entire history will take ages to work. It will be a gradual cultural process. Nobody in this lifetime will reinstitute the folk storyteller, the troubadour, hobbling from place to place.

So let’s chip away at it? In my Fringe show, a poetry reading, I tried to abolish not only the lectern but the concept of applause, the idea that readings should not have musical accompaniments, the idea that poetry readings should necessarily be soporific encounters. For that is what marketing demands. It is keeping the youth away. Probably.

But I am equally not interested in the alternative. The alternative, I realised, is that we become comedians. And that, therefore, to some extent, our poetry becomes therapy for ourselves, and for the audience. A ritual of immolation, for comedy inevitably directs somewhere. We are shooting for laughs, or for sobs, in other words. And the only way to do this is to expose ourselves so much that we become loud……

So why can’t we learn to shut up? To perform poetry as sacred ritual? We already have the lectern for that. Why not stand our books on the lectern, and use them as springboards for incantation, reverie? With an explicitly religious focus, we can get away with the bad singing. It is excusable as praise.

But ultimately performers, at least today, are only ever drug dealers. You pay 5 pounds for a dopamine hit. What you should perhaps be paying for is a poet to truly lodge him or herself into your skull. For their words to become your landscape, your pavement. Perhaps paying for love. And, if we poets know how to do one thing better than carpenters or shepherds or AI programmers, it is to love.

How can performance not be drug dealing? Certainly not at the Fringe. I think we need to reinstitute the procession. Let them pay 5 pounds to dance, scatter dye, wear masks, and recite. Then afterwards we will try to sell them our small-press books.