page poems vs performance poems

I have just come across an interview with Carrie Etter. At the end of the article this topic comes up.

When I am at a reading I know I will never hear the poem again or read it, unless it gets published some time in the future. Often I don't know the name of the poet either, it whizzes past. Followed by many more.

Now I know I need to go up to the person I liked the most and get their name. Then I may see them again at another reading or workshop. Gradually I am getting to know the writers whose work I love the most.

Choosing a set is interesting. Do I make sure nothing is ever read out twice? Or do I read out my favourites? Do I test things out on live audiences, risking the not quite rightness of a piece? Do I dare to read out a piece I wouldn't want published, knowing it won't be recorded, risking that exposure, deciding it won't go any further, letting others enjoy it there and then, live but not in type?

The other thing is that I have to speak loudly, so a soft gentle poem can't be spoken in that way and also be heard. That means only direct, uncompromising poems can be read out across a big room.

Now I know that a writer produces many things which never get performed or printed. The more experimental and personal pieces. The ones which are more from themselves and which mean more to them than to anyone else. So the performance or the print version is just part of it.

Amjad Nasser - Imagined Sons - Prof Asher Susser

This is a bit of a sandwich:

Here's another book for my wish list. It is half way between prose and poetry. It looks like covering both the writer's and the translator's life. I really like autobiographies. The more personal the better, but then I can put a book down whenever I choose. Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser and translated by Jonathan Wright, who translated Hassan Blasim.

Without planning it, I have read another complete collection of poetry on a Tuesday. It was so fast, I started to read it, then found I was nearly at the end. It stirred me up, so I wrote some incoherent rambling with an awful pen with loose ink which goes all over the place. This is preparation for a workshop I am going to, given by Carrie Etter. I see a life-time of poems about her lovely son. As she lives on, hopefully he will live on too, living their parallel lives until perhaps they meet.

Listening to my current online Professor is taking up a lot of time. The lectures will disappear in a couple of weeks, maybe sooner. I have 16 to get through by then. The topics have come up to my own life time. I hadn't expected to feel in some way responsible and far more unsettled in a way I hadn't for the pre-1964 sections of history. As an adult I do now have powers to support or not support what others do.