There is a tendency, in live poetry, for the performers to talk in between poems, explaining the background behind the piece they are about to read. This seems reasonable enough. After all, a performer needs to engage with his audience – it would seem strange if a poet just stood up and launched into verse. But it also presents certain problems: if a poet tells us what his poem is about before reading it, does that not influence our perception of the work? I often wonder whether I would interpret a work differently if it hadn’t already been explained to me; just as the titles of paintings in galleries almost tell me what to think about them.
I became particularly conscious of this tendency after seeing Tamsin Kendrick perform at Salt Margins at Whitechapel Gallery recently. Kendrick was a brilliant performer, and I really enjoyed her poems, but perhaps more than that I enjoyed the anecdotes and explanations that preceded them. As I was so entertained by these preambles, I wondered if it would have been acceptable for Kendrick simply to stand up and tell anecdotes in front of us. But that, of course, is what stand-up comedy is. Comedians don’t give an anecdote then say, “And here is a joke I wrote about that”. The anecdote is the joke, the preamble is the performance. Of course, some comedians tell jokes with punch lines, but I prefer the anecdotal style: I like it when people simply talk about life, presenting it in such a way as to expose its absurdity.
This ties in with one of the problems I have with performance as we conventionally see it. When we watch performances, we bring certain expectations: a comedian must make us laugh, a musician must be well-rehearsed. But some of the best performances I’ve ever witnessed have been private ones. Friends have performed brilliantly at social occasions, not as comedians or musicians or poets, but as themselves. People are intrinsically brilliant, and do not need to call themselves performers to convey that. I’ve been thinking for a long time about how we can get so-called “ordinary people” (by which I mean people that haven’t set themselves up as performers) to share their innate ability to entertain.
We now live in a world in which it is increasingly easy for people to self-publish, to self-promote, to organise events and attract an audience. These roles no longer carry the mystery or authority they once did – anyone can do these things. But, perhaps understandably, the people who take up these opportunities are those who know that they have something to offer – those who think of themselves as poets, comedians, etc. I would like to encourage other people to do the same – people who think that they cannnot write, or that nobody would want to listen to them. Value is a very fluid concept – and, just as I often prefer the preambles to the actual performances, it could also be that the people who present themselves as performers are not the only people capable of entertaining.