Aspects of Performance Poetry
RHYTHM
For me, this is key; not only does it give your poem energy and flow, it creates patterns in the listener's mind. As we all know, it can be tiring and boring to listen to someone else talk, so the more you give your audience to do, the more fun they will have. Putting rhythm in your poetry is a key move in inviting them to take an active part in your performance.
Think about rhythm as a way of shaping your piece. Where a poem on the page has a shape that is made by the ink on the paper, your performance poem takes place in time and it is the rhythm of the words, the way you pace your voice, where you pause for thought or breath that creates the shape.
It might help to think about your poem as a piece of word-music. Even if your poem is not in the form of a narrative (a story), paying attention to rhythm will give your poem the structure and shape of a beginning, a middle and an end, like a piece of music.
Play around with rhythms - speed up and slow down to emphasize and accentuate the rhythms - if you've written your piece to a beat, try going against rhythm.
You can use a strict metrical rhythm together with a rhyme scheme, (e. g. rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter) or something much more subtle and free-wheeling.
The important thing is to pay attention to the rhythmic quality of the words, how they connect with each other and how they sound coming out of your mouth.
(For some thought-provoking background reading, look online at the Wikipedia entry on RAP, aka Rhythm And Poetry.)
RHYME
As with rhythm, rhyme lifts your piece up and gives it movement and muscle. It makes the words easier for you to speak and memorize and it makes the audience want to remember your words.
Personally, I don't tend to use full rhyme - e. g. putting words like cat, hat, sat, mat at the end of each line. I prefer to hear and use half-rhymes, internal rhymes, assonance and alliteration - techniques that I'm hoping you'll have covered in class. (If not, try looking up Wikipedia's definition of Rhyme as a starting point.)
NARRATIVE
Everyone loves to be told a story. One good way of getting - and keeping - your audience's attention is to give them a narrative poem.
It's fun to play around with this form. You can start off with 'Once Upon a Time' and tell them a modern-day working of a fairy tale or you can introduce the poem by telling your listeners that it's a true story, something that happened to you. This is sometimes called 'confessional poetry' and when it is done right, it can be electric. The audience feel special because you are letting them in on a secret.
Q: How does it work if you tell the audience something that is obviously fictional - or a lie... do they turn against you?
A: Depends how you work it - you could make this funny or dramatic - if you are entertaining, an audience will forgive most things!
IMAGERY
This is a very common technique in poetry - it paints a picture in the reader's mind and engages their imagination. These are obviously good things to do. In the case of poetry for performance, you need to make sure that these word pictures are paced so that your listeners will be able to enjoy them whilst keeping up with the flow of your poem. Even if your image is breathtaking and evocative, it is not doing you any favours if it then means that the crowd stops listening to everything you say after that point. Therefore, simplicity is the key. (This is not to say that the images you use cannot be rich or deeply connected to the ideas in your piece. Simplicity in poetry is one of the most complicated things to achieve and one of the most beautiful.)
MUSIC
We've already talked how important musicality is to a performance piece, in the section on rhythm. Lots of my favourite performance poets come from a musical background and like to use music in their sets. This can be very useful when you are performing for a long time and want to give your audience a rest from the intensity of listening to words and ideas. Lyrics set to music gives a crowd a different listening experience and can be very relaxing. Other situations where performing with music is useful are where not everyone speaks the same language - music can be pretty universal! and also where the crowd is a bit rowdy and you need to get people's attention.
Here are a couple of MP3 files, which give examples of my work with music - Fluffy's Song mp3 and Turn Out the Lights mp3
HUMOUR
Making people laugh is a great way of making friends with an audience.
I find humour a very versatile tool in performance and often use it as an ice-breaker, especially as audiences can be quite worried that they are in for an evening of 'worthy' or 'difficult' (i. e. boring) evening. A witty poem tells people that you are not taking yourself too seriously. Moments of humour can also be used to underline or heighten serious, sad or dark subjects. Comedy can be the sugar coating on the bitter pill, the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. Even if there is no room for comedy in your poems, it could be appropriate to use a little light relief in your introductions or in-between pieces, especially if you are doing a longer set.
Contender for the Dumbest Things mp3
DRAMA
By drama, I mean adding an exciting, tense and gripping quality to your poem. This could be done through your choice of subject matter, where you describe a particularly emotionally involving situation or event or it could be achieved by the use of contrasts, oppositions and dualities. I'm going to give you quite a left-field example of this - The Poem That Was Really a List has no story or characters in it, instead, I have tried to build up dramatic tension through the juxtaposition of abstracts.
The Poem That Was Really a List mp3
POPULAR CULTURE
Allusion in the poetry of famous dead guys Pope, Milton, Wordsworth etc, took the form of quoting or referring to other famous dead guys such as (Ancient Greek) Homer (or Latin )Virgil. This made the readers feel like they belonged to the same world, a select literary cool club where they knew the in-jokes. In the same way, performance poets use references to songs, products, politicians, tv shows and celebrities etc to bond with their audience.
© Francesca Beard
