Poetry, live

I attended a live poetry reading Auckland some years ago. Here's what I saw...

It was an outdoor setting; brick-floored with a large canvas sail-like covering suspended above. Three large gas heaters on stands warmed us as it began to get chilly. A bar to one side kept a few whistles wet and awakened in one young man the desire to show what an idiot he was by opening his mouth and blurting some form of poetry at the wrong time. But poets are long-suffering people and those of us who kept our senses smiled with a shake of the head while the rest appeared to enjoy the silly boy's blatherings.

A young woman was announced greeted by shouts, claps and boisterous whoops aplenty as she took her place by the microphone. Slim and nicely dressed her clean and presentable look marred somewhat by the heavy black boots peeping from the hem of her long dress. Incongruous to such a dainty form I thought.
Then I saw someone else. I thought him to be some oddball who had wandered in from the doolally group; out for a brief time away from his fellow inmates in the drug rehabilitation centre. I was wrong; he was in fact the guest poet for the evening.

He presented well … I mean you couldn't miss this chap, clothed in a long black jacket, tallish black hat, clerical collar and wearing two crosses around his neck. His pants were a shiny black vinyl and got me wondering how he managed to sit down safely in them. His feet sported very high heeled boots and explained his difficulty in walking which I at first put down to too much pre-presentation plonk. The boots were painted aluminium for effect. It worked; he looked a proper Charlie, with apologies to Charlie. His pièce de résistance were his glasses; they had small light bulbs fitted to each wing looking out at us. When his performance started, these bulbs lit up … as if to say, ‘stand by, motor running’ ...but for all that I only wish those bulbs would have shed some light on what he was saying.

A fellow poet sitting next to me explained that this was an evening of performance poetry, and that the musician tuning up beside the guest poet was his musical backing. (The rest of this particular musician's performance varied from the warm-up only in that it was more bizarre: a cross between an extremely naughty brat at kindergarten who refuses to stop banging away on the old piano and a young unwashed pale-faced overdosed organist away on cloud nine in one of the ultra-modern barns where people hold religious services these days. Whatever else he was supposed to be doing on his amplified electronic keyboard with side-drum … music, it was not.)

The lady announcer introduced the guest poet and a hush fell on the assembled folk. A number of them were half under the table with the drinks already consumed. The guest looked at his notes on the stand before him, lifted his right hand towards his accompanist and it seemed as if all hell had been let loose for he carried on as if he had to use every note on that confounded keyboard. Once that was out of the way he chose different notes at random aiming wild swipes at the drum by his side. At some point this intro’ must have concluded for he then took up a piece of equipment that took us all by surprise. He placed a small loud-hailer to his lips, brought himself right up to the microphone and blew a continuous stream of notes at us, the sound distorted beyond recognition until he'd finished.

It did solve two problems for him though; it drowned out any heckling that might have arisen while freeing him from saying anything to support his performance. He had several sheets of paper which fell off the music stand in front of him but they all appeared blank from where I was sitting, which says it all really. Once or twice in the odd pause I did hear the kind of obscenities one hears at the freezing works, which shocked me really being of a sensitive nature; ladies were present too.

I half expected the management heavies to deal with him but they were nowhere to be seen. That's an unusual combination I thought, heavies with some nouse. The obscenities unfortunately encouraged some in the audience to give loud whoops and claps, the kind you hear from inane TV shows at times, and the performance went on, rather too long. He finished with little in the way of applause even from the whoopers.
Oh, but it was such a relief when he'd stopped.

Dennis Crompton © 1997
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)