An Interview with Alan Reade
ALAN READE: Hi, Stoneking!
STONEKING: G'day Alan. Welcome to Performance Poetry at Suite101.com. Glad you could make it.
AR: Glad to be here.
S: I'm sure a lot of our readers are familiar with your work, but for those who aren't, tell us a little about yourself and how you came to be involved with performance poetry.
AR: Yeah, okay. Well, I started writing when I was really young. One day I wrote a poem - based I think on something I saw on TV- and my kindergarten teacher marched me to the principal's office to show off what I'd done. I thought I was in trouble! Anyway, it was all downhill from there: readings, writings, private late-night notebook filling. I was a teenage word addict. And then at about 17 or 18, I started doing readings at a local coffeehouse, Portofino, in Pacific Grove, California. But I wasn't satisfied with just reading, so I would bring props and small keyboards, and that got a great response. Voila! A performance poet is born!
S: How important is "voice" to the making of a poem?
AR: Crucial. To write a poem mathematically with rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, etc., is easy. It's pulling meaning and contrast out of those words that takes a voice - or in other words, a vision. I mean, Hallmark has shown us that rhyme isn't exactly the key to sincerity. But a poet who is true to his or her work, I can sense it even from reading a flawed poem.
S: Some have said that performance poetry is more like theatre than poetry. What is your reaction to this?
AR: Well, a lot of performance art grew out of painting. And a lot of poetry slams grew out of stand-up comedy, seemingly. So I'm not really sure whose parents performance poetry is. It's kind of a bastard art form. Maybe theatre is its stepmom.
S: I've often had the feeling round many English Department academics that it's an illegimate son or daughter at best. You'll very often hear those who are suspicious of performance poetry, and oral poems in general, say that the performance of a poem "makes the poem sound better than it really is". What's your reaction to this?
AR: That depends. If the poem is meant to be read on paper or aloud and absorbed that way and it's somehow lacking, sure, a funny or musical reading of the piece can liven it up. But a lot of performance poetry is written "for performance," and so there's that built-in sense of scripting for an audience to absorb it. Some things become more intimate and other things become larger. It's a different scale than working on paper. Plus, you're not working visually with words in the same way - with spoken stuff. Sometimes written nuances become totally lost, so you have to build other nuances in - like tone of voice, volume - that are hard to represent on the page. Or (computer) screen.
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