The Limit Is Limitless
III. Freedom In Crisis
In a time of crisis, if you have something to say and choose to say it, you are claiming your right to freedom-slash-interference. Which would then bring up a point about freedom itself being interference. If we use what empowers to free us, when is freedom needed? Are we captives of interference? Performance poetry is an ultimate freedom-slash-interference since it combines poetry, an already daring motion to undertake in this society, with performance...
the body’s vulnerability and by turns its strength... the imagination of technology put to work... the voice’s command of breath as stage.
Any poem which the reader reads well so that we as an audience can inhabit the world of the poem, is a performed poem. While we talk about poetry that uses other tools to engage the audience, it’s the poet's body that takes center stage and infiltrates the elusive “I” of the poem. As the audience has changed, the poet’s being has adopted many personae.
The CyberPoet uses technology to replace the live experience, with mixed results for sure at this early stage in the Web’s history. The prospect of interacting with your screen where you can yell out, “Just Say It!” in the privacy of your home while waiting for the technology to work, is enticing and gives the audience a certain control over the performance. But there is also incredibly inventive work being created using Flash animation on Web sites which transform poems into text-art, where the experience of watching words transfigure into visual art 12-18 inches from your eyes creates a private territory for the viewer.
A re-translation of theater-slash-performance.
Personally, as a writer interested in a multitude of disciplines, languages, inspirations... I feel as if I’m a hybrid poet, with all the baggage that entails—as opposed to a fusion poet, which seems scientific to me. Hybrid has a breeding history to it—I’m a mutt trying to find where performance occupies the same territory as my other poetries. I’m looking for my borders, actually, the country at the center of my limits. Is performance the parent overseeing the bastards roaming underneath? I can let performance become a physical entity if I choose to. The poet is eternity’s language shape shifter whose power is immense, at odds with reality—the who of the poem at odds with the what of it. Whether the who or the what of “I”—performance is breath-machine into my dormant words. My poem tells me what it wants and how to say it, but am I listening?
Breathing life into words is a shamanistic virtue inherited by poets—allowing the power of the word to confront the weakness of the soul, the absolute wonder of the mind, the exchange of vibration, from person to person. Whether that ratio is 1 to 1, or 1 to 1 thousand, the first thing that happens in the space you’re in is that the moment you were in has changed. Your senses are greeted, massaged, attacked, alerted to work in tandem. Your body notices the difference and registers the moment. The vibration remains between performer and audience—making the newly charged air surrounding the performed poem resonate with a shared humanity that can possibly change the world, or at least help illuminate it.
Edwin Torres is a New York City poet who has traveled many landscapes among many poetries. “Confabulissimo verbalocious gymngostics from NY’s Lower East Side,” so says journalist Bart Plantenga. He is a NYFA grant recipient and has been widely anthologized. His publications include The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress) and Please (a CD-Rom from Faux Press), among others. He is a contributing editor at Rattapallax, and his own Web site is www.brainlingo.com.
In a time of crisis, if you have something to say and choose to say it, you are claiming your right to freedom-slash-interference. Which would then bring up a point about freedom itself being interference. If we use what empowers to free us, when is freedom needed? Are we captives of interference? Performance poetry is an ultimate freedom-slash-interference since it combines poetry, an already daring motion to undertake in this society, with performance...
the body’s vulnerability and by turns its strength... the imagination of technology put to work... the voice’s command of breath as stage.
Any poem which the reader reads well so that we as an audience can inhabit the world of the poem, is a performed poem. While we talk about poetry that uses other tools to engage the audience, it’s the poet's body that takes center stage and infiltrates the elusive “I” of the poem. As the audience has changed, the poet’s being has adopted many personae.
The CyberPoet uses technology to replace the live experience, with mixed results for sure at this early stage in the Web’s history. The prospect of interacting with your screen where you can yell out, “Just Say It!” in the privacy of your home while waiting for the technology to work, is enticing and gives the audience a certain control over the performance. But there is also incredibly inventive work being created using Flash animation on Web sites which transform poems into text-art, where the experience of watching words transfigure into visual art 12-18 inches from your eyes creates a private territory for the viewer.
A re-translation of theater-slash-performance.
Personally, as a writer interested in a multitude of disciplines, languages, inspirations... I feel as if I’m a hybrid poet, with all the baggage that entails—as opposed to a fusion poet, which seems scientific to me. Hybrid has a breeding history to it—I’m a mutt trying to find where performance occupies the same territory as my other poetries. I’m looking for my borders, actually, the country at the center of my limits. Is performance the parent overseeing the bastards roaming underneath? I can let performance become a physical entity if I choose to. The poet is eternity’s language shape shifter whose power is immense, at odds with reality—the who of the poem at odds with the what of it. Whether the who or the what of “I”—performance is breath-machine into my dormant words. My poem tells me what it wants and how to say it, but am I listening?
Breathing life into words is a shamanistic virtue inherited by poets—allowing the power of the word to confront the weakness of the soul, the absolute wonder of the mind, the exchange of vibration, from person to person. Whether that ratio is 1 to 1, or 1 to 1 thousand, the first thing that happens in the space you’re in is that the moment you were in has changed. Your senses are greeted, massaged, attacked, alerted to work in tandem. Your body notices the difference and registers the moment. The vibration remains between performer and audience—making the newly charged air surrounding the performed poem resonate with a shared humanity that can possibly change the world, or at least help illuminate it.
Edwin Torres is a New York City poet who has traveled many landscapes among many poetries. “Confabulissimo verbalocious gymngostics from NY’s Lower East Side,” so says journalist Bart Plantenga. He is a NYFA grant recipient and has been widely anthologized. His publications include The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress) and Please (a CD-Rom from Faux Press), among others. He is a contributing editor at Rattapallax, and his own Web site is www.brainlingo.com.
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