Performance

Recap: I've been rejected from two prose competitions and one poetry journal. I've submitted my work to many, many more to outpace these rejections. I attended my monthly poetry reading group, a poetry workshop in London, a craft talk with the inimitable George RR Martin, and my regular feedback night to workshop some nonfiction. I also attended a performance workshop.

All that sounds like the standard life of a writer, right? Balancing a self-destructive work ethic with social events that are really just different manifestations of productivity. If you don't know me well, this is how I operate. Everything has a purpose. Now more than ever, as the cost of living refuses to lower and my decision to move part-time at work still feels like a mistake, I am constantly working. The fire is raging beneath my feet and I'm sprinting. It's great.

I want to discuss that last event I mentioned: From Page to Stage, a monthly poetry performance workshop hosted by the Oxford Poetry Library. My new friends at OPL were raring to go, but July's host needed a few more attendees to make quorum. On a caffeine high at a work party, I tore through my reluctance to re-enter the world of poetry performance and signed up.

Why would I be reluctant? I love performing. I literally attended Stella Adler during high school. I love sharing a bit of me with the world and drinking in the applause. However, performing poetry is very, very different. In previous posts, I've alluded to who I was in college—broody, resentful of other writers, unable to find my voice and offended whenever audiences detected this and offered middling reactions.

To be fair, some of the poetry others shared in college was horrendous. You can only hear a poem about cigarettes as a metaphor for sex so many times. But often, my derision was not towards their words, but their delivery. I hated the way poets presented their words with the same lilt at the end of every line, the same trembling, awkward tone as though this was the bravest thing they'd ever done. Were they just copying the latest Button Poetry video to mimic profundity, or was this how they naturally read? When it became clear I couldn't deliver a suitable, more sincere counter-method of performance, I retreated from it altogether. My poems existed in my notebook, and open mics were for singing only.

Now, given some personal events during my recent visit back home, I want to give my college self a break. Trauma does not exit the body once you cut off contact with its source; it lingers and accumulates like dust, and you simply cannot sweep it away every day when you have a life to get on with. In my first two years at Sarah Lawrence, my creative process, and my voice itself, was stagnant. I suffered three brutal heartbreaks, two of which involved infidelity and, therefore, the loss of two very close friends-turned-lovers; one of those two also didn't do wonders for my sense of personal boundaries and consent. I cultivated a reputation for lingering on the past, never shutting up about the men who convinced me to love them, so I decided they weren't allowed in my writing anymore—at least, the writing I shared at open mics. That severed me from a rich source of inspiration, but it's what needed to be done at the time. Most of the poetry I shared was about sunsets, the seasons, nature, and writing itself.

Couple that with my literary influences at the time: most of the books and poems that resonated with me were written between 1600 and 1960, and I refused to embrace the 21st century or recognize prose poetry as a legitimate form of writing. While I struggled to hear myself over the din of the past, I latched onto high diction, florid vocabulary, and strict meter to organize my thoughts. The result? A John Donne wannabe serving up word salad with the driest monotone delivery you've ever heard. I hated my poems and myself for believing they ever stood a chance. It showed.

Now, I've found a decent balance between structure and free verse, and have embraced my poetic voice (though according to some literary agents, perhaps I overdid it because it infiltrated my prose). And, since I've started to share my writing, it was time for lesson on how to perform.

Before the workshop, I messaged the host asking them what type of poem I should bring: something theatrical or metrical? Something dazzling? As I typed and re-typed my message, I realized how many mistakes I used to make when approaching performance:

• Mistake #1: I used to view every open mic as a competition. Sure, it's nice to wow an audience with something they weren't expecting, given the low stakes of an open mic. But that's not the point; open mics are, to some extent, workshops. You can bring in a rough draft, or a work-in-progress, and the audience will understand.

• Mistake #2: I barely rehearsed because, again, I hated my writing. I'd rush through each line so that I didn't appear indulgent, lest someone in the crowd resent me the way I resented other poets.

• Mistake #3: I used to shelve my older poems and consider them lost causes. Workshops were only for the pieces that maybe stood a chance. It's only in recent years that I've decided to revisit, edit, and publish those forgotten works.

• Mistake #4: I used to mentally check out if a workshop leaned more into prose and spoken word. They explored a form I didn't write and didn't give any credence to, so the workshop could only help me so much.

Again, this haughty, conservative approach severed me from the vulnerability required to write something authentic, something that I could truly call mine. So for this workshop, I called a spade a spade. I wanted to know how to deliver metrical, or at least more formal, poems in an interesting way.

I won't run you through every minute of the workshop, but here are some personal takeaways (written in the second person to myself but if they hit you as well, then sure they're directed at you too):

• Gommie is amazing and you need to follow him and buy his art.

• Stanislavsky/Stella Adler training actually comes in handy, and separating monologue or scene analysis from poetry performance has been a terrible oversight. You already do this for singing and cabaret shows, so why not with your writing?

• Your poetry deserves to be taken seriously; the audience wants to sit with your words. Rushing will always leave you dissatisfied.

• Preparation and rehearsal are everything; your work deserves care and attention. You deserve to be in control of it. It's not modest if, every time you're on stage, you say you scribbled these lines on a napkin and have barely read it since. It's careless, and both readers and audiences would rather hear how much this matters.

• Be passionate. The passion you felt when you wrote the damn thing should erupt when you vocalize it.

• Leave yourself alone.

I hope to share two new poems at the next OPL open mic night this Tuesday. They've undergone several redrafts already, and I'm now annotating them using the framework outlined at Page to Stage. I can't guarantee a showstopper, but I'll be so, so much better than I was.