Sounds like a great experience, Richard.
I recall a scholar of the Ghazal telling us at the U of A years ago
about this kind of audience participation, & complaining about the
failure of North American audiences to interact with poets in such a
way. I think you're right about the embarrassment factor, but also it's
a factor of learned politeness. That, even as against concerts, where
we applaud every song, we expect & are expected to sit politely through
the whole reading & applaud at the end. It takes a special reading or
performance (I've seen it for a sound poem) to get applause for a
single poem in the middle of a reading.
It's really a question of socialization, though, don't you think?
Wouldn't most of our poets find the demand for them to repeat a line or
two, or the 'interruptions' a bit of a problem, throwing them off, &
perhaps embarrassing to the poet as well...?
Up tight, all right...
Doug
On 11-Apr-05, at 4:22 AM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
> I have just come back from being a part of my first mushairra, which
> is the
> word in Urdu (at least I am assumingn it's Urdu) for a traditional
> gathering
> of poets in Pakistan, and it is a very, very different experience from
> the
> kinds of readings we have here in the US. The most significant
> difference is
> not only the degree to which the audience responds to a poet as he or
> she
> reads—calling out baah-baah, or vaah-vaah, after verses or images or
> rhymes
> that have moved them—but also the way in which the poet responds,
> repeating
> the verse that the audience has singled out sometimes two and three
> times.
> With the exception of my poems and the poem read by the guy who
> invited me
> to this event—Paul Catafago, executive director of Movement One—I
> understood
> only a very few words of the other poems that were (Urdu is closely
> related
> to Persian, which I understand and speak a little of), but I would be
> lying
> if I said I appreciated any of it as poetry. What I appreciated was the
> openness and sincerity and clear desire to support the people who got
> up to
> read; there was in that room a genuine love for poetry, for language
> and the
> way language can move you, the way language can change the way you see
> things—and this was particularly evident in the way the audience would
> themselves repeat along with the poet a verse that he or she had
> already
> repeated two or three times—and it's not that audiences in the US
> don't feel
> this, but we certainly don't express it during a reading. We may go up
> and
> say something to the poet afterwards or we might clap at the end of a
> particularly moving poem, but we do not, we are trained not to, there
> is
> something in the culture here that prevents us from participating in
> the
> poem as it is read, from giving voice to whatever it is that the poem
> makes
> us feel. It's almost as if we are ashamed of it, which reminds of
> something
> Sam Hamill said in one of his essays about how embarrassed we get as an
> audience when the poem a poet is reading moves him or her to tears,
> especially if it's a him.
>
> And it is fitting that, as often as not, the responses of the people
> in the
> mushairra were non-verbal, or they were quick, ejaculatory comments,
> like
> the baah-baah I wrote about above. I remember taking a course with
> Hayden
> Carruth when I was studying at Syracuse University and it was about
> precisely that, the non-verbal aspects of poetry and how it is those
> aspects
> that often give voice in the poem to the emotional energy that breaks
> the
> bounds of words. Carruth's course was about rhythm and meter and
> rhyme, but
> also about why it is that poets will often spell out the sounds "Ah!"
> or
> "O!" in a line, and we talked a lot about how those things function
> similarly to grace notes in music or the way horn players will
> sometimes
> allow their high notes to crack a little bit. In fact, the
> participation of
> the audience at this mushairra reminds me, now that I am writing this,
> not a
> little of the way audiences at concerts will sometimes start
> spontaneously
> to clap their hands to the music.
>
> I read four pieces, two from my translation of the Gulistan and two
> ghazals
> in English, which this audience especially appreciated—most of the
> poems
> that people read, I think were ghazals in Urdu—and I don't think I
> have ever
> felt more warmly received or more genuinely appreciated as a writer
> than
> when I heard this audience express their appreciation and enjoyment
> right in
> the middle of my reading.
>
>
> _________________________________
> Richard Jeffrey Newman
> Associate Professor, English
> Chair, International Education Committee
> Nassau Community College
> One Education Drive
> Garden City, NY 11530
> O: (516) 572-7612
> F: (516) 572-8134
> [log in to unmask]
> www.ncc.edu
> [log in to unmask]
> www.richardjnewman.com
> http://richardjeffreynewman.blogspot.com
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
He saw the dark as a ragged garment
spread out to air.
Through its rents and moth-holes
the silver light came pouring.
Denise Levertov
|