- Bernstein asserts that "(a) poem understood as a performative event and not merely as a textual entity refuses the originality of the written document in favor of the 'plural event' of the work... (5)." Given how few poetry readings are actually recorded and available beyond the moment of the event itself, what impact does the ephemerall quality of performance have on our ability to understand and appreciate a work? Are we less able to understand and interact with a work that has been read in a forum to which we had no access?
- There are both intended and unintended additions to the text when a poet reads his/her work aloud. For instance, are we meant to read William Carlos Williams' work with an internal voice that sounds his sibilant "s" when we encounter it on the page, having heard his reading of it in recording? What, as listeners, are we to do with the intrusions on the text by soundings that are not part of the poet's intention, but simply the result of peculiarity of speech, artifacts of the recording process, or external, ambient noise? How are our reactions to these sounds different when we encounter them in disembodied recordings of a performance rather than in the embodied experience of attending a poetry reading?
Listening to "The Ballad of the Girlie Man" by Charles Bernstein, I am struck first and most profoundly by the impact of the uncomfortable, high-pitched giggling of a man in the audience that appears almost randomly in this recording of the reading. It begins before the poem itself begins, during Bernstein's chatty introduction when he first mentions the idea of the girlie man and returns on the words "girly sarong" and "sissies and proud." It's an incongruous giggle; clearly male and popping up at odd moments in a poem that is, at it's core, an assertion that there is a sort of misconstructed masculinity behind our actions in Iraq. This is not a funny poem, and the giggle accentuates it's seriousness by being so very out of place.
Now, were I actually at the reading, I might know the giggler and be able to tune him out as someone a little simple-minded, or perhaps as someone likely to be squirming uncomfortably because the idea of the girlie man is more personal to him than it is to most folk in the audience. I might shoot a knowing look at my companions, or an angry one toward the disturbance meant to silence the giggler. But it would remain outside of the poem in the way the walls of the coffee house or student union building would remain outside my perception of the reading as an embodied experience. The giggle would be part of the aural setting, and not become part of the text itself.
But recording flattens everything out, particularly work that is either recorded without or played without surround-sound technology. The giggle, though softer than the words of the poet, is now enmeshed permanently in this performance of the piece. It signifies the very discomfort the poet is suggesting; the giggle becomes a sort of synecdoche for masculine discomfort. And, in coming to signify, it also becomes a part of the text of the poem in this iteration of the work.
I don’t imagine that the Bernstein would object to this addition to his work; it seems to add a layer of meaning that can only exist because it comes from beyond the authorial voice but that is nonetheless very much in line with what the poet is saying. But what is the noise enmeshed in the work were different? What if it did not speak at all to the poem, but were instead the random sound of a chair being knocked over? What if it spoke against the text, as in a protestor angrily calling out to the poet that her husband had died in Iraq and just who did he think he was, anyway? What if, like William Carlos William’s sibilant s, it was simply an element of the aurality of the work beyond the poet’s control?
How are we, as listeners, to parse the difference between “noise” and “sound” in these recordings? Do we discount or include the ambient sounds in our experience of the work? Does it matter if the sounds themselves are incidental and unrelated to the work (as in the weak s ) or if they are elicited by the work (as in the giggle)?