Jon Corelis wrote:

>The cultural moment vaguely called The Sixties saw a great expansion in the
>validity of arts for opposite reasons. Film, jazz, and folk music, for
>instance, it was successfully argued, are as legitimate arts as opera, the
>novel, or theatre, not because the practictioners of the former have a
>consciousness as valid as anyone's, but because film, jazz, and folk music
>require as much talent and discipline, and are as capable of giving as much
>pleasure and understanding, as are opera, the novel, or theatre.
>
>
The one thing I can agree with unreservedly is that people in the 1960s
began interpreting art as free expression, and training could be viewed
as a detriment because you weren't playing-what-ya-feel-maaaaaan. All
that technique crap would suppress or block your true gift, ahem, oh
Childe of Gawd. The idea that Coltrane or Miles Davis or Joan Baez
could actually READ music and didn't just blare into or strum their
instruments...never mentioned. For the rest of it, the 10 of us who
listened to opera expected training because opera wasn't supposed to
feel spontaneous: and I shared this view, even though by then I'd seen
enough performances to dispel such rot. I guess the dope was stronger.
Much was made of Hubert Selby's "Last Exit to Brooklyn" as an artless
transcription of life in the Red Hook projects, when it turned out to be
anything but artless. Distasteful, obscene, graphic...but once you
figured out how to read it, you could discern that every step was
planned. Nobody back then heard of artistic choice, or we chose to
forget it.

>This is why open mike poetry readings often, and this may be said without
>hyperbole, verge on being group therapy sessions, and sometimes go over the
>verge. Over the door of my poetry academy, if I had one, would be a motto
>from T. S. Eliot: "Poetry is not an expression of personality; poetry is an
>escape from personality."
>
>
Congratulations, Jon, the first sentence above defines the Slam. I have
no idea why a poetry reading--even an Open Mike--has to resemble a
barroom fight, but that has more to do with the same culture that
produced those related phenomena, American politics, the MBA, and
hip-hop. Having been at one slam 11 years ago, I found myself
uncomfortable with the idea of people screaming at other people and
exposing everything but parts of their anatomy. "I hate: white people,
black people, straights, gays, my parents, my mother, my father, you, my
boss, capitalism, myself." I suspect the last covers it: mass
psychodrama. For open mikes themselves, no problem here as long as it
doesn't turn into a game of Horse. You have some writing to try out,
you're not famous enough to rate a Feature just because you show up (I
am not Jorie or W. S. Wolman), so you suffer through the one-poem-max of
an Open. The little guy in the corner is beating time and looking at
his watch.

Like any aphorism, Eliot's statement makes great sense until the third
time you read it. Then begins the hundred-page essay to discuss what he
meant.

>I've noticed the same paradox: a poet is special, but everyone is special,
>so everyone is a poet. The poetry community has become like the small town
>Midwestern school system described by Garrison Keiler, where "all the
>children are above average."
>
>
Concerning the word "special," I refer you to the comments of one
character in the diner in the opening scene of Tarantino's "Reservoir
Dogs." I assume Keillor is kidding with that Lake Wobegon riff, which
is older than last summer's unfrozen fish. People may have special
qualities, uniqueness to their own beings, and I guess everyone has one
poem or story inside them, but many of us go through a whole career
looking for it and drag other people with them. Speaking of which,
August Kleinzahler had a few choice comments, in any case, about the
Keillor mentality in a recent issue of Poetry. Trust a guy from Jersey
not to B.S. you....

>The image that has often come to my mind is of someone with no talent for or
>training in singing inviting people into the bathroom to hear their
>discordant bellowing in the shower. And of the audience, in all sincerity,
>applauding it!
>
>
It happens in opera too, Jon. Why would an aural nightmare like
Vladimir Galouzine, a stentorian shower-stall tenor with a voice
destroyed by Valery Gergiev, wind up singing Otello at the Met and
Puccini's Des Grieux in Chicago? Because someone is paying a large fee
for him to do so and more are paying to hear what happens.

ken

--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538