Getting It Rote

A Poetry Performance Practicum
by Jan Steckel

For a week or two before I do a reading, I practice my entire program of poems while taking my daily three-mile constitutional stroll around my neighborhood. Declaiming and gesticulating wildly, I breeze past the teenage toughs on cell phones clustered in front of the liquor store, the grocery-store worker unloading mangos, and the bent-over old woman poking through the trash bin for bottles. Homeless people pretend not to see me. Panhandlers don't dare to panhandle me. Even potential muggers edge away nervously. Whatever I've got might be catching.

It's worth the social stigma, though, because there is no question in my mind that memorizing improves performance. It makes it a better experience for me and for the audience every time.

Mark States (in the photo with me, above), who teaches the Public Speaking for Poets Workshops at the Berkeley Art Center, gave my poetry performance its biggest boost when he taught me to memorize my poems. Mark's memory is much better than mine. If we were living in a pre-literate culture, he'd still be some kind of Homeric bard, while I'd caulking reed boats or grinding acorns between flat rocks. It takes me forever to memorize anything. I have to do it with a hand-held tape recorder, while lying on my living room couch. I read the poem into the recorder, then put aside the page and say the poem along with my recorded voice. I keep reciting in chorus along with myself until I feel confident enough to try recording the poem again, this time without a script. I then listen to the new version while reading along with the written poem to see if I've made any mistakes. I keep doing this until I can say the poem correctly several times in a row.

Then, eyes closed, I listen to my own delivery on tape and think about whether the emphases, the phrasing, the inflection and the dynamics sound right. I try different ways of saying things, maybe coming down harder on a word, maybe separating two adjacent consonants for clarity, maybe trying to make an “s” hiss a little less. I pay attention to how loud various parts of the poem are, and where I take my breaths. Then I practice until these subtleties, too, become automatic. Only then do I get up off the couch and try moving around while I say the poem, with gestures and expressions, and I practice those, too, sometimes in front of a mirror. As you can imagine, the process of learning a single poem by heart (especially a long one which does not rhyme) can take me not just hours, but many days. My neighbors on the side next to the living room window treat me with that indulgent politeness most people reserve for congenital idiots and victims of senile dementia.

Still, it's worth it. When I've memorized a poem, my hands and body are free to move around and interpret it. Even more importantly to me, my eyes are free to meet those of my audience and gauge their reactions. I can make listeners feel more emotionally engaged by making direct eye contact with them, and I can emphasize certain phrases with my gaze. I've had poems that barely drew any attention when I read them off a piece of paper come to life in a memorized performance. People have come up afterward to tell me how much those poems moved them when they never even noticed the same poems read from a script on earlier evenings.

As Mark points out in his workshops on the first Thursday evening of each month, the process of memorization is also one of revision for performance. If I keep saying the wrong word, I have to ask myself if the word I first wrote is actually the right one. If I keep stumbling over the same line, maybe that line needs to be rewritten. Also, what works best on paper is not always the same as what works best aloud. Try it with one of your own poems (a short one!), and you'll see what I mean. Maybe your memory is also better than mine, and the process will be easier for you than it is for me. All the more reason to memorize your best poem for the next open mic and see what a difference it makes.


Originally appeared in the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review, Summer 2005, published and edited by Jannie Dresser and Marvin R. Hiemstra. Email poetsreview@comcast.net.