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Musings of a Performance Poet - reading between the airlines

© Billy Marshall Stoneking

I left Australia in 1997, a virtual exile. I was soul-sick, at the end of a twenty-year marriage, and in great need of a change. The cozy confines of inner-city Sydney no longer nourished me, not to mention the fact that the arbiters of taste and culture had grown decidedly hostile towards the kinds of plays I was writing. "They're not Australian enough," they'd say. It was a type of mentality that would've declared Shakespeare un-English on account of Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice; the same, old cultural cringe I'd come up against during the Walkabout Tour. I was tired of it. There was a world out there, and (who could say!) maybe it would be more inclined towards the sorts of ideas that interested me.

Poets are driven by images, and the image of the exiled poet had great appeal. It took over my life. I was going on a very long journey, to Tuscany eventually - my eventual destination, my own transcendental masthead where, like a latter-day Ishmael, I was sure I'd find the inspiration I was seeking.

My first port-of-call was Santa Cruz, California, a place I'd visited during the Walkabout Tour. Past-life counselors, astrologers, and life trainers of every variety had set upon us with ecstatic rapture during that tour. "Wow! This is what poetry used to be like back in the 60s!" they had enthused. But few things remain as we remember them, and Santa Cruz was to be no excepton. In the intervening years, the academics had tightened their grip on the poetry scene. At the University of California, the only poetry worthy of serious consideration was "language poetry". Poetry about poetry. Language about language.Its devotees were middle-class English students, and its high priests, their professors who warmly embraced Ezra Pound as their literary grandpap, though the old man probably would've cried "bug wash" in the face of what he'd wrought. To me it smacked of studied cynicism, and produced the same sense of claustrophobia I'd felt in Australia.

The prose-poem had also gained in prominence. Morton Marcus, a well-known Bay area poet and college English teacher who hosts a weekly one-hour poetry show on Santa Cruz radio, told me he'd never enjoyed writing more. "It frees me from the tyranny of the line." It also freed him from poetry. A piece from his second collection of prose-poems, published by Hanging Loose Press in New York, begins: "My Uncle Ernie found a head in his bowling ball case. It was nearly a perfect fit, a 'mob job. Probably drugs,' said the cop as he flipped over the pages of his pad and tucked it into his shirt pocket."

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