A short reflection on poetry performance inspired by a recent John Latta post

I've always thought (and thank god the likes of John Latta seem to think so too) that contemporary poetry's gotten too brazen for its own good, unaware that talent will out wherever it is, and that all the self-exhibitionism in the world won't cover up talentless work. He's used a theatre analogy to good effect. Having "resorted to using face powder and dressing rooms and displaying itself on the stage", poetry's become what I think is an empty "theatre of cruelty": never to be taken in the uniquely Artaudian sense of theater as significant place of grotesque & violent passions where a living art form is so relevant it bites the spectator in the butt. It's rather a case here of the cruelty of unbridled production without any real thought for artistic sense or propriety or, more importantly, protest. I'd like to continue this poetry as theatre analogy a bit more.

The noise & fragmentariness, especially of the more self-aggrandizing poetry performance today, might be taken as poetry theatre but, as I've said, with none of the restorative powers of social commentary or, at the very least, a mastery of materials. Think of Bök's Cyborg Opera, on the one hand, as performance that (again, in Latta's words) merely "gushes", a conceptual poet's pastime, drawing more attention to performer than art, and Penn Kemp's "Poem for Peace In Two Voices", on the other, as one that "sucks up and absorbs", drawing artistic verve from the ground & the essential dark of wind, rain & animal processes:

One's imitative, a second-rate Schwitters impersonation while Penn's is the product of a lifelong devotion to sound poetry & artistic activism in general that traces its ancestry to The Four Horsemen. Latta's distinction is particularly instructive in the case of two contemporary Canadian poetry performers. And I just happen to be enough of a traditionalist, with a penchant still for rating work, to say that a well-directed analogy easily separates the real thing from all the dross swirling round it.