My Search for the Perfect Opening Poem
© Karen Alkalay-Gut
There are some poems that are completed when they are performed. It's not that they aren't complex, or that they don't work as poems on the page. But they take on a different dimension when they are connected with a person and a situation. These poems demand a specific atmosphere that is created in the course of the reading.
The first moment of acquaintance, the opening poem of a performance, is a particularly complex context – anticipatory, fragile, and sometimes so overwhelming it frames the rests of the performance. William Stafford, for example, would begin his reading by holding up the palm of his hand to the audience, and then begin, "Here is my hand." Because it is an offer of friendship as well as an assertion of openness it determined the audience's warm acceptance of him. It was a gesture of immediate human acquaintance and formed the basis of the relationship to come. When I heard him read the poem, he even explained that to us, disarming the audience and relaxing himself.
Anne Sexton, on the other hand, always set a complex mood with her performance of "Her Kind," that assertion of intimacy and distance.
The vulnerability and weakness of the speaker, coupled with that amazing Joan of Arc image at the end, presents the message of the poet as volunteer martyr, suffering for the rest of us. Whatever she read after that must have elicited warmth, sympathy and fear.
Lucille Clifton often begins her readings by disarming her audience and endearing them immediately with her poem about her own body, "Homage to My Hips."
The first moment of acquaintance, the opening poem of a performance, is a particularly complex context – anticipatory, fragile, and sometimes so overwhelming it frames the rests of the performance. William Stafford, for example, would begin his reading by holding up the palm of his hand to the audience, and then begin, "Here is my hand." Because it is an offer of friendship as well as an assertion of openness it determined the audience's warm acceptance of him. It was a gesture of immediate human acquaintance and formed the basis of the relationship to come. When I heard him read the poem, he even explained that to us, disarming the audience and relaxing himself.
Anne Sexton, on the other hand, always set a complex mood with her performance of "Her Kind," that assertion of intimacy and distance.
HER KIND I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waving my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor, where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.
The vulnerability and weakness of the speaker, coupled with that amazing Joan of Arc image at the end, presents the message of the poet as volunteer martyr, suffering for the rest of us. Whatever she read after that must have elicited warmth, sympathy and fear.
Lucille Clifton often begins her readings by disarming her audience and endearing them immediately with her poem about her own body, "Homage to My Hips."
HOMAGE TO MY HIPS
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