A soft chair

So I read to a private group of students in Cambridge tonight. Nice audience, fit but few.

I didn't do a lot of gab, but did once utter those terrible words "this next poem". It was because we were très intime and it would have been wrong to be too polished, somehow. I read from a chair because everyone else had done so - and if I'd stood up to read it would have looked a) precious and b) like an implicit criticism of everyone else who'd read sitting down. I could have stood on the chair, I suppose, to make a comic point - but they didn't look as if they were expecting comedy, and indeed, it would have been practically the only comedic moment in the performance so everything would have been downhill thereafter. Besides, it was a soft chair. At times like this I wish I had more comic poems in my repertoire.

As for the seated position, I can't say I favour it. I recall once seeing Carol Ann Duffy reading from a chair, and she was much criticised for it. I hadn't been to many readings at the time so couldn't see what was wrong. And now, I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who wants to read seated. Who is to know what unspeakable ailment they might be suffering?

No question, it makes a difference. I felt underpowered. It's true about not being able to breathe so deeply, but there's more to it than that. I also felt a certain loss of status. It's an impression that doesn't withstand close scrutiny, but is nevertheless mildly disconcerting. It's something to do with delivery. One feels obliged to curb the slightest tendency to perform rather than read. There is an equality about the situation, particularly with tiny numbers. The audience is seated too: how easily the roles could be reversed. And they were, because to begin with we had poems from people who'd attended the workshop prior to the reading. I'm totally OK with that - but the last thing you want to do in that situation is come on as the Big I Am. So there was a chair, from which the readers read, and other chairs seated around in a horseshoe and we took turns, me last and longest as the guest.

Do I have a poetry voice? Probably, though the thought appals me. Nobody likes to admit they've got one. Most people do, even if it's understated. Duffy does. Robin Robertson does. A poetry voice can be at the other extreme: just think of Thomas Lux.

It reminded me of the time when I went to look round an old merchant's house in Ledbury. No one else had turned up for the guided tour, but the guide nevertheless treated me as if I were an audience of many. She pitched her voice high to reach the back of the crowd, and went into spiel mode, never catching my eye. I think she was too shy to do it any differently, though she seemed embarrassed too. But when I asked questions she answered quite normally.

A poem isn't a normal thing, though. It's not something you've just thought of that you're telling someone, though some poets - eg John Hegley, Michael Rosen - tell theirs so seamlessly you can't tell the join between poem and gab. And there were some of my poems that wouldn't have felt right in front of a tiny audience, at least while I was sitting down, because they are too rhythmical and not at all like ordinary speech.

And yet and yet. This still doesn't explain it. Sometimes I go and read to groups of blind (and invariably old) people; I read them favourites like The Listeners, Cargoes - anything they request that I happen to have in my bag. And I read sitting down, and they will join in if they know it. These are almost invariably rhythmical poems unlike ordinary speech, and I'm expected to ham it up a bit. Is it easier to do a cover version, because the voice is not one's own?

More gab about gab

In a comment on the last post I casually remarked that actors and musicians rely solely on their art to communicate with the audience. Poets, on the other hand, tend to gab.

Even as I clicked Publish, I realised I was wrong about musicians. How could I have forgotten? When I was a kid way back, folk song was popular and every little town had its folk club with regulars and itinerant performers. Ours was in The Bull on Friday nights, and in its heyday there would have been well over 100 people there. And musicians did links. They might tell something of the background to the song (fishing, canal-digging, mining, political struggle) or its origins (trad, Ewan MacColl), where they first heard it, or what they might have done to adapt it to the voices and instruments at hand.

It's not just folk singers, it's other popular forms like country and western, crooners and, sometimes, jazz. Even rockers might pause in the middle of a gig to ask the audience "Are you having a good time?" if they could be sure the answer would be a resounding "Yes!" (OK, maybe that was just to distract the audience from the retuning of guitars.)

I'd thought the habit was a feature of popular music, but in a recent Independent, there's a letter from Judy Vero, correcting an earlier article I'd missed:

David Lister asks why conductors do not address their audiences more often (6 February). Here in Birmingham it happens regularly.

Sir Simon Rattle began the trend many years ago, and it has now become an established feature of concerts by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Our dynamic and highly talented young Latvian conductor, Andris Nelsons, has clearly set out to build a rapport with his audience. We look forward to the moment when he turns to face us and addresses us as "Dear ladies and gentlemen..." The music become far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it.

So I looked up the David Lister article:

...Before conducting the Schoenberg piece, Barenboim gave what was described as an "illustrated talk" from the podium, introduced the various themes from sections of the orchestra, explained how they fitted together and how the motifs were subtly altered and repeated. This prelude to a 21-minute piece lasted nearly half an hour. The audience was rapt, partly because this was a master showman at work, with a sense of comedy and timing to be envied by many a stand-up comedian. By the end of the talk he had the audience, not quite whistling Schoenberg as he had promised, but at least learning to love him, which is quite an achievement.

But Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt. I also think it was because it was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert...

It's worth reading the whole article. It's instructive that Lister cites charisma and entertainment, but the main purpose of Barenboim's address was instruction. The talk lasted half an hour. That's not gab, that's a lecture. Clearly a lot of thought and preparation had gone into it. It was billed as an "illustrated talk", so they were expecting it. Even the most devoted Barenboim fan would have started to get a bit restless if they'd gone there expecting only music.

Music, like poetry and theatre, is a temporal art. The curatorial notes* in art galleries are often written precisely because (most) visual art outstays the moment and context of its creation. For the same reason, they're easier to ignore: they occupy visual space, not temporal space.

But note how the curatorial can shift into the personality:
The music becomes far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it. (Vero)
... Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt... (Lister)
Conductors are some of the greatest personalities in the world of music, and by virtue of what they have to do with an orchestra, some of the greatest communicators, yet we never hear them speak or even see their faces. (Lister)
... would it be so terrible to have a screen above the orchestra so that one could see the facial expressions of the conductor, his or her glances at various sections of the orchestra, rather than just staring at a back all evening? (Lister)
(My bold. And yes, it would be so terrible.)

It was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert. One can imagine a few aficionados being disdainful of anything that mediated between them and the music, but perhaps they would stay at home anyway, just reading the score. More profess resentment of the curatorial notes at art exhibitions (and a fortiori those recorded Walkman tours), which they regard as patronising and limiting. I haven't hired one for years: surely they have improved. But I always read the notes. They are always informative. Sometimes they have a wonderful lightness and wit. For some brilliant curatorship, where the talk virtually takes the place of the object (cf poem, symphony, song), listen to Neil MacGregor on Radio 4: A History of the World in A Hundred Objects. MacGregor is the Director of the British Museum, and in each programme chooses one of its exhibits to cast light on the society from which it emerged. When he places the Olduvai artefact into the hands of someone like David Attenborough to respond to and interpret, it's beautiful radio.

Some poets' gab tends more to the curatorial than the charismatic. I suspect the poetry audience tolerates more of the latter than the former. And not much of that. They particularly resent being instructed how to interpret the poem. The Author is Dead, remember?

I'm straying from the point. I started looking at gab as an overlooked part of the performance, and it's led to the point where the gab is the performance, with the referent playing a supporting role - offstage, in the case of A History of the World.

I'm still developing my theory of gab. Meanwhile here are a few more thoughts.

Our receptivity to gab relies on
• the relevance of the gab
• the authority of the gabber
• the skill of the gabber
• the personality of the gabber
• our expectation that there will be gab



* I'm interested in the idea of museum object by way of contrast to performed art: immutable but open to interpretation the way a music score or a poem is - or at least the idea that the interpretation of it can be artistic as well as scholarly. How far can the museum artefact be distinguished from a contemporary work of art, like a painting or a poem? Of course it has a historic provenance and purpose which, however disputable, are in theory knowable. Or in another theory, perhaps not. I don't know the first thing about curatorship theory, but it must be as rife with different factions and revisions as any other area of intellectual effort.

Gab

Bernard O'Donoghue, to whom I owe the title of this post, self-deprecatingly dismisses his entertaining interstitial chat as "just gab". I’ve never heard him use those killer words "This next poem..." His intros are tangential. They may illuminate the poem from a distant place, but make no attempt to explain it, let alone render a prose version. The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.

Gab between poems. Like it/don't like it? How much? What sort?

These questions are prompted by a recent reading where some readers gabbed and others took the piano recital approach of reverential silence. (Knowing chuckles from the audience, coughing, shifting and recrossing legs permitted.) Odd, really, because some of their poems are so dense they need recovery time. And sometimes I'd appreciate it if they gave the occasional poem a leg-up, given that this was a rare chance to hear the poet in person, rather than just the tape running in my head when I hold the book.

One non-gabber even prefaced his reading with a brief gab-denouncing gab. I thought I detected a certain froideur between the two camps.

Although I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s not easy to formulate a critique of gab. While there is a lot of commentary on reading the poem itself, I haven't found much about the bits in between. Here are some fairly inchoate initial thoughts on a large and divisive subject.

What is gab?
Anything which isn’t a poem - whether a few introductory remarks, or a long chat between poems. It includes modes of speech known by more polite terms, such as conversation, talk, chat, anecdote, aside, reminiscence, yarn, joke, ad lib, etc. Proponents of gab will say that it’s a perfectly natural interaction between performer and audience. You might wonder why on earth I’m angsting about it, but bear with me. It also gets called more derogatory names, such as patter, spiel, waffle. By using this term I’m trying to be dispassionate about it for a bit.

We’ve come to hear the poems, so why gab?
Gab has complex and overlapping functions, both informative and phatic, not always consciously employed (and not always successful):
• To acknowledge courtesies.
• To get the audience used to the sound of the poet’s voice.
• To establish goodwill.
• To establish or adjust status – eg I may have a reputation for being difficult to understand but I’m just an ordinary person like you really. To democratise.
• To provide context for something arcane, to explain an unfamiliar reference.
• To release tension, eg after poems about highly emotive subjects. Done badly, it can drain energy from the performance.
• To provide breathing space between poems. This is the most commonly cited. There is a perception – which may be wrong – that some audiences cannot bear too much non-stop poetry, that they need to pause and consider what they’ve just heard. Gab requires a much lower level of attention, but it may undermine the period of reflection it’s intended to provide. A short period of silence may work better.
• To avoid monotony.
• To entertain.
• To deal with interruptions.
• To establish or re-establish control.

Critics of gab might add further categories such as:
• To disarm or befriend. Those who favour a conversational style of reading will slip more naturally into chat with the audience.
• To control interpretation of the poem.
• To let the poet off the hook. To evade commitment to the poem.
• Habit
• Fear
• Vanity

I wonder too if the prevalence of gab is something to do with the growing requirement of the market. Like other writers, poets are expected by publishers these days to market themselves as personalities. This doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but when audiences start looking for personalities and newspapers can publish two-page interviews with a poet without quoting a single line of poetry, gab is hardly a surprising by-product.

Some audiences ask for gab. On occasion, when invited to read I’ve been specifically asked to give background to the poems. (Younger listeners know very little about the Cold War, and no one knows much about V bombers.)

How prevalent is gab?
It's so widespread it’s almost taken for granted in some quarters and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Less experienced readers are inclined to absorb the performance style of people they admire. When I first started reading to an audience the perceived requirement to say something non-fatuous between poems was far more anxiety-inducing than speaking the poems themselves. I’d have saved myself some agony early on if I’d realised that saying nothing at all was an option.

About ten years ago we formed Joy of Six. I’ll blog about that one day, but for now the relevant thing is that we read our poems without any gab in between, often without even giving a title. We choose poems that can withstand a quickfire delivery. It doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t get everything as it wings past, so long as the poem delivers something: a promise, a mystery, a teasing sound. The next poem will aim for another effect, intensifying or contrasting. We often read to audiences who aren’t used to hearing much poetry. Our enthusiastic comments book suggests that the “breathing space” theory doesn’t necessarily apply to multi-voice performances.

Gab is not always appropriate
The TS Eliot readings allow only 8 minutes a poet, so there's no time for it. Anyway, that occasion seems to require solemnity. Nevertheless, a creeping gabbiness can be detected. It was clear a few years back that performers had been warned off any gab whatsoever, because nobody said a word but their poems. It was oddly formal, but not displeasing. I can understand the injunction against gab, because poets famously have no idea how long it takes. But this year, almost everyone had something to say that wasn't a poem. Even the rigorously non-gabby Alice Oswald felt constrained to comment on how Weeds and Wildflowers had come about as a collaboration.

The gabless performance
Foregrounds the poem.
Foregrounds the language.
Foregrounds the voice as performance.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets favour it.
Poets with a sculptural sensibility, such as Elizabeth James, favour it.
Poets with a dramatic sensibility, such as Paul Durcan and Alice Oswald, favour it.
It takes courage.

Gab as performance
Poet, wit and raconteur: Michael Donaghy was an exemplar of gab. Simon Armitage*, when he's on form, can give Ian McMillan a good run for his money. John Cooper Clarke blends poetry with standup. John Hegley adds a mandolin. Michael Rosen has it down to such a fine art you can't tell where the gab ends and the poem begins. That's not actually a criticism, since the whole thing is about giving a performance. At a very basic level it's about holding the tribe’s attention, whether with stories, jokes, political rhetoric, music or the language of the poems themselves.

We are talking about many different sorts of performance and venue here: the concert hall, the SCR, the pub. It would have been weird and alienating, I think, if John Burnside hadn’t chatted to the audience at the intimate reading at Toppings.

Gab or pure poetry?
I was talking to a couple of poet friends about this last night. S said he had no time for gab. It's self-indulgent and boring. He hates it when poets give the background to a poem, and he hates it when they tell tangential stories. Or else it shows lack of confidence in the work: above all, he hates it when the poet tries to give the impression he's an ordinary bloke like them, and tries to be their friend. He doesn't need to like the poet. He doesn't need to know anything about him. He has come to hear the poems. He cited a reading recently where each of the readers had chatted away between poems: it virtually sent him to sleep. When he gives a reading, he doesn’t feel the need to address the audience other than through the poem, because everything he wants to say is in the poem.**

J completely disagreed. She thought the poet could seem arrogant and rude if she didn't address the audience. She cited the example of a well known poet years ago at the Troubadour, when the performance space was half the size it is now. In refusing to engage with the audience he came across as contemptuous of them. The audience are people, individual human beings, not disembodied intellects. Some are listening with their heads, some with their heads and their hearts. Some audiences are not just randomly collected, but bonded communities.
She thinks too, that people need downtime between poems, otherwise it all gets too intense.

Bad gabbers?
This is a public space.
Oh, all right then:
A few years ago at Aldeburgh a distinguished foreign poet felt obliged to introduce each poem. Although it’s very common, gab is not a universal expectation there. Unable to trust herself to ad lib, she read from a script. It drained all the energy from her performance.
Archie Markham. His gab was fascinating, and the only reason he is here on the bench where he can't defend himself is that when I heard him I found myself wondering when he was going to read an actual poem. However interesting the gab (and it was), people had come to hear his poems.


People have very different reactions to gab. It can be seen as an integral part of performance, or an aesthetic insult. Surrounding the poems with silence like piano études can be seen as either professional or arrogant. Some people insist they go to hear the poems; they don't want the poems explained or undermined, and they certainly don't want the poet trying to ingratiate himself. If the poem is baffling in places, the language should carry it through, and in any case there will be another one along in a minute. In fact, this is the theory behind our Joy of Six performances - to keep the energy level high. Yet when we perform individually, we all gab. Appropriateness of gab depends on the audience and venue.

There is a lot more to say about all of this, and if anyone can recommend some studies, please let me know.

There are some things that everyone agrees on:
• People have come to hear poems.
• It's a mistake to assume that anyone will be interested in your domestic arrangements. (Well, they probably will if you are someone famous.)
• It’s a mistake to explain the poem. This next poem is my attempt to show the transience of beauty, and the irony that... (Sorry, I already nodded off.)
• The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.
• It’s fatal to apologise for the poem.
• It is better to be silent than to gab badly.


*"Simon began to read and immediately had the audience in the palm of his hand. The first two poems he picked were hilarious; the first on the surreal musings of a sperm whale and the second on the quasi biblical crossing of a causeway before the tide was properly out. He had his rather staid audience rolling with laughter. His ad libbed comments between the poems were also funny, and his timing when reading was like watching the best of comic actors. Having got us totally onside he moved on to a range of poetry covering a great mix of styles and emotions. His preambles before each poem made everything quickly accessible even if you had not heard that poem before, or if the poem proved difficult."(Juxtabook)

**Which, come to think of it, sounds just like the attitude some men have to sex

Set list

Toddington Poetry Society are a lovely bunch of people to read to, engaged and responsive. Thank you for asking me.

There's a vogue for recording set lists, so this is what I read last night:

To Paint a Bird (Jacques Prévert, trans AB) - on account of its being 14 July
Holdall (Aircrew)
Yellow Sun, Green Grass
Revesby
The Boasts of Jim McKay
Small Arms
Russkis
Downstairs
Nav Rad
Co-ordinates
The Men from Praga
Britannia
Chamber of Horrors £2 Extra
Chattel

All but the Prévert come from The Men from Praga. The Prévert translation is available on Frank Parker's site here, and the first five TMFP poems are downloadable from the Salt site (pdf file). Nav Rad was featured on small change, and Britannia on peony moon. The title poem is on poetry pf. That still leaves plenty of other poems to read in the book.

At the organisers' prior request for "background" to poems I interspersed plenty of what Bernard O'Donoghue deprecatingly calls "gab". The audience needs a breather between poems, they said, anxiously. Well, of course - and I wondered whose poetry blitzing they'd suffered in the past before it dawned on me that they were probably worried I'd try a one-woman Joy of Six blast. What J6 are doing is something different altogether: the philosophy behind that merits a separate post some time. In the more conventional poetry reading, it's important to give the poem a bit of aural space, but without betraying it. When Bernard does it, it's an artform in itself. It was while listening to him, years ago now, that it dawned on me how good it was not to keep hearing that phrase "this next poem". I've never heard it on his lips, and resolved forthwith to try to banish it from my own.

At the other extreme was a nervous poet I heard at Aldeburgh a few years ago. Much praised and garlanded, she'd flown half way round the world to read at the festival, but some freak of nerves had caused her to write out all her intros and ad libs and read from them as if they were poems themselves. It was horribly embarrassing.