Zooming Into Poetry Readings In Plague-time: Silver Concho Poetry Series
Michael Sedano
They’re here to stay, poetry readings via Zoom. And for artists reading your own stuff aloud, that means change, adaptation, opportunity. This is evident as you start attending readings, like the recent Silver Concho Poetry Series sponsored by Press 53 and hosted by editors Pamela Uschuk and Bill Root.
Technology offers major change in the way audiences experience the poet. What hasn’t changed are why you read to people: to sell them some books.
One poet in the lineup sold out the publisher’s inventory and now Press 53's ordered a second run.It’s not what you say, it’s also how you say it.
That’s what sold those books for Richard Vargas: superb poetry read effectively. Vargas’ poetic voice speaks with wisdom, incisive humor, restrained bitterness, and the hottest irony around. That the artist reads his stuff better than the others in the set today makes a difference.
When a critic says stuff like “he’s better than the others,” that should raise another performer’s next two questions, “what about me?” and “what’s so good about him?”
What About Me?
Every reading happens in three planes: the reading you thought you would give, the reading you actually deliver, and the revisions that hit you after you clicked ‘mute’ and it’s too late to say it like that. Not so. There will be a next one.
Readers have a wonderful technology-driven opportunity to self-confront. Look at that person on screen. What objectives did he or she achieve? Speech 1A, Purpose: inform entertain persuade instruct. Voice & Articulation: can I understand the sounds as words I know? Do I get directness, eye contact, personalization from that face? Do I want to hear more? That person on screen, that's you.
Vocal variety. The downfall of every bad-to-average reading you’ve ever attended is called “The Voice.” Good poets find such ponderous weight in every dad-gummed word that their reading comes at you relentlessly like a robot pounding on a tambora. Is that what you do to your work on screen?
There’s the opposite effect, when reading voice and transitional conversational voice sound identical, as if the poem is a desultory interruption in the conversation. Conversation is a key.
How do I lose my “the voice”? “I’m not an actor, I’m not getting in front of my camera and emoting!”
One way of changing your vocalic style is imagine yourself seated with a friend and you’re sharing a line or two. Another friend pokes her head in the door, you catch her attention without stopping, she enters and you include her in your reading. Now more people enter and take seats and you expand your presentation to bring them all into the spell of words. My friend and mentor at USC, Milton Dickens, called this “the enlarged conversation."
Another of my mentors, Aristotle, and a montón of rhetoricians through the ages, advocates finding a model to emulate. Vargas’ transitions offer models of economy and pertinence. For example, the Marilyn poem he links events of the past few days to the memoir. When a transition provides immediacy like this, audience draws closer to the poet and the poem expands in meaningfulness. Captured imaginations say, “I want to read that one again.”
Vargas’ directness comes without notice, even in the absence of direct eye contact, it's in his eyes, you can see them. Richard's not reading, he’s reciting from memory. Or, perhaps the poet is a technology whiz. His glasses reflect a text page, not the Zoom matrix. So long as Zoom audio is running, a reader can open a window to the poem and read off the screen with the appearance of constant, person-to-person eye contact.
Richard Vargas doesn't start out strong. He doesn’t get “up to speed” in comfort level until the third poem, Marilyn. But his programming makes up for it. He starts with his best short poem, one dripping irony and the persona’s mystification. This reading segues into a masterful aesthetic construction, Guernica, revisited, whose power and passion would draw an impassioned reading from any other reader, too.
What did I like about my presentation? What behaviors do I plan to repeat?
Ask anyone and get a litany of complaints, “I left out..., I didn’t do..., I was nervous…” That’s not what you asked. What did you like about your presentation? Back to Speech 1A. Did your introduction make a point? Did you pause effectively after the title and the final line? Be honest and straightforward and list your skills.
Now, what are only one or two elements I will do differently? Compare parallel elements with how the model performer does it. Copy and try it on.
"I know I can do better." Then do. Rehearse three times, each time raise those issues: what did I do well, what are one or two behaviors I want to do again, less of, more of. Keep it fresh, no more rehearsal.
The power of the pause. It’s subtle but effective. Vargas announces the title, half a pause, another half, begin. The final line, “There. Is. No. Art. Here.” Silence. Eye contact. Hold that silence--even a beat longer, Richard. Avert your glance to release the mood, transition into the next title.
Transitions help audiences listen. “My next one…” is not a transition. “Let me see where it is…” is a transition, the bad kind. Transitions summarize what went before, summarize its import in a word or two, announce something else. Chatty transitions work well when the poet is chatty, not nervous. Vargas, for the most part, lets his work speak for itself, preferring fewer words of transition but direct to his purpose.
How do you look on teevee? How do you sound? How do you want to?
That person on screen is really what you look like, and sound like. Technology makes it so you can alter elements, like did you know you can superimpose cartoons over your face?
Not that anyone wants to you to dress like a turnip when you read to them—kids might, and this “filtering” is something you can learn about Zoom technology. Start by shedding any learned helplessness about technology and gain facility with pushing buttons. Learn to test the connection, so when it’s your turn, you start. “Am I on? Test test, 123?” First impressions are lasting impressions.
Learn Chat. You could put your poem in a side window for your audience to read along. Reading and listening enhances the heck out of your pieces while covering up some delivery issues.
Learn to do cool stuff with the computer and Zoom. What can you do with backgrounds? Lighting? Filters? This is on-the-job training for today’s artist. Click this link to read a primer on Zoom technology, from a recent La Bloga-Tuesday.
Produce a Considered Reading: Not Acting.
Movement and body gestures lose import when you’re planted in front of the camera. Simultaneously, the camera makes vocal variety and eye contact ever more vital to an effective reading.
If selling books is goal one, sharing poetry is your means to that end. Merely reading words is not reading poetry. Review your reading, start-to-finish. Did you hear poetry, or words?
While every person experiences a reading differently, every reader at the Silver Concho will benefit from attention to vocal variety, eye contact, pausing, and transitions. The process of delivering a considered reading begins at composition, those subvocal readings to make words fit, edit, read it again in your imagination and the crowd goes wild. Read it aloud that way.
Effective vocal variety begins with marking up your manuscript, highlighting words and phrases that matter more than others. Find expressions in the lines where you can alter delivery--speed up, slow down, make a face, make a voice, sing, isolate with pace and pause. Make the sounds fit the lines like a facemask and gloves. Visualize the image under the words, hear the sounds, feel the mood, and your voice shares the moment.
Analyze and apply.
I did not hear enough analysis in the Silver Concho program. These artists assembled a head-spinning virtuoso collection of poetry to read to you. My ears struggle to discern what’s important, the words and phrasing come out with a sameness of voice, tone, pacing. Now and again, a poet produces a satisfyingly aural moment. Audiences love that and forgive lots of drudge for those golden moments.
That's little different from most readings, maybe your last reading, too? Identify those moments in advance, rehearse and install them into the performance.
Poets work hours to hone an expression into the right words in the right place, then read them with all the words sounding like all the other words, in relentlessly patterned meter dominating how the words mean.
Enjambment is your friend, poets. Readers who pay obeisance to the visual line create a heavily accented, ponderous reading. Lines that sound like any other line and words having identical value to any other word fails the poetry on that page. Oral presentation is not words on paper.
Suppose you sold a few books. Your reading satisfied that many people who had spare money. How many more books would you sell with a reading that more fully shares all the truth and beauty and hard work you invested into those pages? I advise writers to respect their art. Do the work.
Here’s a link the full Silver Concho reading on Face, the first of three. I hope future readings will begin to employ the Chat feature. Listen to the author and while your ears work, share the work with your eyes. Seeing with hearing with reading multiplies the impact of words, the poetry emerges off the page.
Read and listen, y sabes que? Buy the book, because there are more poems like this (link).
does your arm tire
as you swing your
baton into the thud
of my flesh and bone
and you hear me
moan in pain
when you crack
my ribs and jab
my soft belly
do you feel like a
job well done when
you pin me on the
ground and harness
my wrists like a
rodeo cowboy
hogties cattle
no matter that
we are both looked
down upon by those
on their balconies
of glass and steel
who laugh and joke
as they spread caviar
on fancy crackers
that will never pass
our lips
while you choke me
knock me down
look at how they
raise their flutes
of exquisite champagne
sparkling in the sun
blinding you with
cold brilliance
and empty nods
of approval
Richard Vargas, pub. in Guernica, revisited (link to publisher). 2014
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Silver Concho Poetry Series Reading presented by Press 53
Anita Endrezze’s poetry [Read by Pamela Uschuk] collection, Enigma, appeared in the Silver Concho Poetry Series in 2019. She is the author of eight books of poems and is of Yaqui, Pima and Maya and European heritage. She lives on the coast of Washington state.
Richard Vargas received the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference’s Hispanic Writer Award and was on the faculty of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference. His book of poetry Guernica, revisited appeared in 2014. He resides in Madison, Wisconsin.
Hedy Habra is a Lebanese American poet and essayist, born in Egypt. She has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth, winner of the 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award; Under Brushstrokes, finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award for Poetry; and Tea in Heliopolis, winner the USA Best Book Award and was finalist for the International Book Award for Poetry. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Maj Raigain [QEPD read by William Pitt Root], beloved bodhisattva and poet, passed into another dimension in 2018, but not before his final collection of poems, appeared in the Silver Concho Poetry Series: Clouds Pile Up in the North: New & Selected Poems. He is sorely missed by the poetry community he nurtured at Kent State University and beyond.
About the Silver Concho Poetry Series
Believing that small presses publish some of the most vital poetry in America today, we support Press 53 in its ongoing pursuit of furthering the cause of American literature. Our aim is to select each year the two highest quality poetry manuscripts written either in new voices or in voices inexplicably forgotten or ignored. Open to all forms and styles, we do favor compelling poetry with a distinct edge.
—William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk, Silver Concho Poetry Series Editors
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