"Buddy,
don't take any wooden nickels."
1. Area: performance poems, exploring sounds and emotions
In general, try doing your performances with a different over-arching
(or underlying) emotion. Try altering the tempo and volume of your
delivery to avoid falling into rote habits - find the home note, tone (chakra
vowel), find the melody
line and/or rhythm and play with it. Try doing the poem excruciatingly
slow and ridiculously fast, keep exploring corners, nuances, hidden
parts of the poem... always go towards the most intensity... ray
2. Area: performance poems, movement, gestures, body
expressions
Just as William Strunk, Jr., said*, "Vigorous writing
is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words for the
same reason that a machine should have no unnecessary parts." The
same holds true for performance and performance poetry. Movement and
gestures are not random. A movement or a gesture either adds to the poem
and performance or takes away from it. It adds clarity to the
message or to the impact or the experience of it, or it takes away from
it, muddles it, or confuses the audience. Look as closely at the
movements or body expressions as you do at the writing. Go over it and
over it and over it until it works as an integrated whole. Help?
Full length mirror, cassette recorder, or a video camera and
recorder. You get the feedback.
* with E.B. White in the now
classic "The Elements of Style"
3. Area:
writing, creation, spontaneity
Forget the audience. Temporarily.
Put yourself into it and let it come out without any thought of judging,
being judged, critics, reviewers, editors, etc. In the creation process
one must silence the critic in order to just be, in order to be free
enough to let things happen of their own accord, to allow the inner to
become the outer.
4. Area:
writing, creation, spontaneity
Kerouac said, "you just have to purify your mind and let it pour
the words and write with 100% honesty both psychic and social and slap
it all down shameless, willynilly, rapidly."
That's what he called spontaneous bop prosady...in other words blow
as deep as you can blow. I would add revision to that equation. He did,
in spite of the lore that he did'nt, his drafts belie otherwise.
However, editing does not mean censoring. You have to put everything in,
even what you don't like about yourself -- especially that stuff. To be
fully honest to your humanity in all its horrors and beauties.
"All art is born of surrender." - - erica jong
"Be
always ecstatic. Be filled with a divine intoxication." - -
Henry Miller
