Celebrities of Performance Poetry

This essay is a fragment, a chapter, perhaps, of Winged Words, a considerably longer work on orality in poetry.


     John Masefield, a rather popular poet himself and a long-term Poet Laureate, said, “Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.” [1] He is certainly correct that poetry spoke to the hearts of all in the traditional village, in the theater at Epidauros and in the Globe. Nonetheless, a description of the public career of several poets of the last century and half will indicate that, well after the spread of literacy, indeed, even after the growth of mass media, the appetite for oral poetry persisted among general American audiences. However their appeal seems based on that particular sort of stylized individuality called celebrity rather than poetry alone. Just as certain movie stars play more or less the same role again and again [2] (an option unavailable to stage actors), the marketplace taught poets that, to be popular in an age of mass media, they had to construct a consistent and appealing public personality and generate color and drama as well as reading poetry.
     This generalization is supported by a review of the most popular readers of poetry in recent times. Each of the cases below conjures an image of the poet stretching to bridge the increasing gap between high art and common showmanship. In the first case, audiences saw a cultivated individual impersonate simple country folk. In each of the others, the contrast is reversed: the supposedly refined poetic sensibility is represented by a hobo, bohemian, or drunk. Either way the contrast provided piquant and popular entertainment. The poets’ poetry, while it might sell books, was not in itself enough to attract a mass audience to a reading. Ticket buyers were motivated by the wish to see a celebrity or at any rate a colorful personality. The successful performing poet, it seems, must be exhibited as a curiosity or at any rate a novelty.

1.
     James Whitcomb Riley, once one of the most popular of American poets, a man who dined at the White House, whose statue stands in his home town, and whose birthday was made a state holiday, is now remembered for a few pieces relegated to “children’s verse.” Having begun as an entertainer for the Wizard Oil Company before he had attained celebrity as a poet, Riley supported himself after 1875 primarily through public poetry recitations, and by 1889 he was touring most of the year. Known for his rural personae, dialect poetry, [3] and conventional sentiment, the man himself fascinated audiences. He was elegantly dressed and well-spoken, yet able to slip into his folk idiom at will. Often the program consisted of a series of acts, sometimes featuring poetry, lecture, and music during the same evening. Riley appeared sometimes with other practitioners of regional dialect such as Mark Twain or George Cable. [4]

2.
     In the early 20th century Vachel Lindsay was able to support himself primarily through readings while preaching “the gospel of beauty.” He still liked to call himself a “beggar” and a “mendicant,” and the fact is that before he had become well-known he financed lengthy walking tours by reading in boarding houses, restaurants, and saloons in return for food and a bed. Challenging American materialism, he said his poems were “printed expressly as a substitute for money.” His reading style was grand and loud, in the old theatrical manner, featuring gesture and posture and nonverbal exclamations. He reports his audiences for the most part well-satisfied, but also records with wry “hip” amusement the reactions of those who thought him mad or called him a lazy bum. Lindsay was at once a counter-cultural bohemian and a popular entertainer.
     He was far from unique. In a letter, Lindsay describes the state of poetry in his day:


The famous 1912 New Poetry Fire kindled by the good and great Harriet Monroe was burning up the prairie, and anything any poet did was temporarily news, at last. New Books of Poetry were popping like Popcorn. Amy Lowell was telling Massachusetts just where to get off. Ezra Pound had broadcasted imagism from London. In just two months [Edgar Lee Master's] Spoon River [Anthology] was to start in Reedy's Mirror, and to be read to tatters in Chicago and London before it came out in Book Form. Frost was coming out in England and was about to be lionized in Boston, Sandburg was soon to receive his first prize, that for His poem on Chicago, from Harriet Monroe, and all the poets in America for the first time in thirty years were looking one another in the eye.


     One finds no division between high art and popular here. Poetry magazine is “burning up” the Midwest. Books are “popping” out of the poets’ consciousness and, presumably, off bookstore shelves. In order for Miss Lowell to tell Massachusetts as a whole “where to get off,” Massachusetts must have been listening. Spoon River Anthology is to be serialized in a weekly publication that had evolved from a newspaper supplement. It was perhaps the last moment at which it could be said that “all the poets in America" “were looking one another in the eye.”


3.
     Amy Lowell [5] was perhaps unique in the degree of her efforts to market herself and the “new poetry.” She declared poetry to be her trade, and with a twentieth century tradesman’s eye for the role of advertising in a sound bottom line, noted "Publicity first. Poetry will follow." She boasted "I made myself a poet, but the Lord made me a business man." T. S. Eliot dubbed her the "demon saleswoman." In the words of the actress Eleanor Robson Belmont, Lowell "perform[ed] the service of a barker at a circus, as from the lecture platform, in the press, and almost the street corner, she cried aloud, 'Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry.'"
     Her readings were multi-media events which featured such effects as a drummer behind a screen, while Lowell herself sang, shouted, whooped, cake-walked, and stomped. She smoked cigars, and as the reading proceeded she donned one after another of a whole series of pince-nez which she brought on stage in a basket. In the words of Van Wyck Brooks, "she whizzed and she whirred, and she rustled and rumbled, and she glistened and sparkled and blazed and blared." Poet John Brooks Wheelwright called her "the Biggest Traveling One-Man Show since Buffalo Bill caught the Midnight Flyer to Contact Mark Twain." To Louis Untermeyer she was "not merely a lecturer, she was an event, a national phenomenon, a freak of nature, a dynamo on the loose."
     Though she cautioned both D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce against explicit eroticism, her work foregrounds a powerful but veiled sexuality exciting to her audience in a way that would today difficult to conceive. [6] Her work was immediately meaningful to readers puzzled by the maneuvers of high modernism in works by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. She retained popularity in the role of a safe and entertaining bohemian whose outrageous repartee never became frightening. She seems to have cultivated "public rows," beginning with her combative assertion of imagism at the 1915 Poetry Society of America meeting (at the end of which angry literati charged the stage). She noted with satisfaction that, after she had attacked Whitman calling him “primitive,” “wild,” and, more surprisingly, as “a man of little influence” at the celebration of his centenary at Philadelphia’s Contemporary Club (where Whitman himself had been a member), her books sold out in that city.


4.
     Dylan Thomas’ notoriety persists to this day. Thomas provided the image of The Poet [7] to better than a generation of readers of English with his unruly curly hair, his alcoholism (so congenial to a Romantic notion of the artist/hero), the “angelic” melody of his voice, and his imagery, at once surrealist and patently emotional. He was for a time the darling bad boy of the intelligentsia, reading mostly on university campuses yet misbehaving in the most satisfying and “artistic” way. [8] Thomas’ tours were commercially successful, [9] and the poet’s status was evident in his introduction not merely to literary figures, but also to Hollywood celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe.

5.
     Allen Ginsberg was known to millions from Howl’s obscenity trial and photos in Life magazine who never read his poetry. By taking off his clothes repeatedly at social gatherings during the nineteen fifties, he guaranteed name recognition well beyond the literary sphere. By appearing at the Human Be-In in January of 1967 he positioned himself as a father of the youth revolution. His appearances were often spectacles including chanting and music. I do not doubt that Kaddish will continue to find readers in the twenty-second century, but I would guess that a greater number will know his reputation.


     Though universities can still fill halls to simply hear a talented poet read, it appears from the American history, a few points from which are sketched above, for a general audience something further is required. Perhaps this development became inevitable as soon as performance ceased to be the most common way of presenting poetry. Thousands of years after poetry was first recorded in writing, it was still sung or chanted, often with dramatic embellishment, certainly with expressive voice and body language. It may be that, once the universal tradition that bound ancient Greek and medieval English audiences fractured into the varieties of modern sensibility, the delectation of poetry for its own sake became inevitably a minority taste. The poet today who is as little attracted by the “poetry lite” of Billy Collins and Ted Kooser as by the easy sensationalism of much of today’s performance poetry might as well stop lamenting the art’s small audience and either be glad of a coterie of devotees or cultivate an attention-getting mode of performance capable of seducing today’s listeners.




1. This statement from Masefield appears on a hundred quotation sites, but nowhere is it attributed. A few mention his book The Daffodil Fields, but that seems to contain no prose. The source is immaterial to my use here, but its mystery annoys me nonetheless. Surely someone can inform me of the source.

2. John Wayne is an example of the latter, Paul Muni of the former. Cary Grant could do his patented version of suave elegance, but could also do first-rate comedy and a variety of other roles.

3. Riley’s work with dialect was an influence on Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

4. Cable deserves more readers for his portrayal of old New Orleans and for his progressive politics.

5. Much of the information in this paragraph and the next two is derived from Melissa Bradshaw. “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification.” Victorian Poetry 38.1 (2000) 141-169.

6. To some readers this represented the masking of her own homosexual orientation. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, "Writing Lesbian" (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981); Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1985).

7. As, for the same era, Einstein became the typical intellectual. By the late 1950s Time and Life had found more contemporary sensational poets and, with a few series of photographs set up the Beats in business. (Though this last phrase aspires to irony, these pictures lit the imagination of such suburban youths as myself.)

8. For instance, before reading at Pomona College, he lost his papers and notes. I recall a university professor pointing out the step on a stairway on which Thomas had fallen as a sort of holy relic.

9. Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney approached Thomas in New York City in 1952, recorded him, and launched Caedmon Records, the sole recording company specializing in spoken word.