Peter Fortunato Performance Art has been out of quotation marks for at least a little while, and even if some U.S. Congressional types can't say exactly what it is or why it's so subversive, a 1988 entry in Webster's New World Dictionary (Third College Edition) cuts to the quick with these words: "a presentation in which the artist juxtaposes images on various themes and provides a usually non-narrative commentary on them." Dangerous stuff, this: inviting people to sort out for themselves what it all means. Dictionaries aside, however, it's still about as hard to define one sub-genre of Performance Art, namely Performance Poetry, as it is to say what poetry is. "Spoken Word Art" has recently emerged as a label of choice, but what does that tell an audience except that what-you-are-about-to-experience will be at least partly oral and aural? As with all of the performing arts, if you want to know anything specific about the form, you really have to be there to catch it on the wing, but be forewarned: individuals of the species vary widely. There have always been poets who vocalize or sing their lyrics with panache, rather than succumbing to the vaudevillian. The art is better served when they remember Longinus' warning that "amplification destroys the sense of the Sublime." While there are no doubt some rock-and-roll-poets who want nothing more than to make their fortunes through such deconstructive acts, the best Performance Poetry - some of Laurie Anderson, for example - uses language to take audiences across territories previously charted as "song," "story," "monologue," and so on. At its greatest, it also recognizes and communicates something of the power of silence, that quality upon which all poetry depends in order to approach the Sublime, which is beyond forms. Certainly, a poetry performance promises to be something different than the stereotypical reading we all dread by the diffident, mumbling author with eyes glued to the printed page. Around forty years ago, the composer and poet John Cage, an ancestor of what we now call both Performance Art and Performance Poetry, first staged events that directly and indirectly invited audience participation. Like his dada forbears, Cage understood that the resulting awkwardness, heightened awareness, and outright fun, comprised an art form, which he dubbed a "Happening." Be there or be square - perhaps. More importantly: Be there and Be. Cage realized how this special sort of participation could enlarge our understanding of what happens in any encounter with a work of art, and inspired by Zen Buddhism, he sought in many kinds of works to show the connection between art and daily life. Cage was always pointing out that since an art experience is largely dependent on our attention, on our state of being, it is "participatory," and learning to risk ourselves with challenging artworks (including the intentionally boring, the absurd, chance events, and those that overload the senses) can have import for all of our living. That art happens to challenge us in both private and public arenas is one thing that distinguishes it from most sorts of popular entertainment. Like any other poet, I know well enough how shy people can become when faced with poetry, whether it's presented to them in print or offered out loud. This resistance seems to come with the territory in our society, where the apparent uselessness of poetry and non-commercial art - its invaluableness, as Carolyn Forche says - can be clumsily equated with frivolity, self-indulgence, or a secret code intended to exclude the uninitiated. Nevertheless, as Galway Kinnell notes, even today no undergraduate education is complete without some exposure to both classic and modern poetry, and millions of college students have the experience of writing poetry either for a course or just because they understand intuitively that poetry is the language of the soul. At that level, it can't be bought or sold - at least I hope not - and this is what Stanley Kunitz points to by saying "Poetry resists commodification." It's natural to strive to give shape to essential matters, to wish to communicate them directly with language, and to be touched in turn by the revelations of others, especially in an age of impersonal, electronic media. Furthermore, poetry, like the human soul, is fundamentally democratic and inclusive, as Whitman always reminded us, and as we feel when we risk self-revelation. These are some of the reasons why poetry publications persist despite the odds against them, and why attendance at readings and performances remains relatively high. We understand their importance to us individually as well as collectively. I muse on these subjects often, having sometimes called myself a Performance Poet, and having tried to do more than simply read my poems aloud during the last thirty years. But the immediate inspiration for this essay is the recent visit to Ithaca of three accomplished poetry performers, three of the four members of a Los Angeles group, Nearly Fatal Women. On Wednesday, October 22, they appeared at the Moosewood Bar & Cafe, and the following afternoon, with an entirely different program, in Kaufman Auditorium at Cornell. Nearly Fatal Women: not your stereotypical L.A. show-biz-wannabes- so-we'll-be-your-femmes fatales -your-sweet-and-deadly-farewell-lovelies. Hardly. These three women, these three poets from the City of the Angels have their performance licks tuned up, their wits honed bright, and a sense of humor, a collective tone, that avoids strident polemics while it affirms humane values. Three very distinct persons, very distinct body-types and voices, three unique sensibilities. On Wednesday night they performed separately, in series, with Linda Albertano opening the set (as she would also open Thursday's program). Albertano is a woman of considerable height whose physical presence, blonde and powerful in dressy attire on both nights, was utilized as a part of every piece she presented. In a made-up language, with expressive hand-gestures she greeted the Moosewood audience, out in front of the podium, warming to us as we warmed to her. (But how close is she going to get? I was asking myself, noting the edginess that almost always accompanies Performance Art, where boundaries are crossed continually.) Obviously experienced in a variety of settings - here was no stage, no proscenium demarcated except by the space the performer created for herself both behind and before the podium - Albertano's work was characterized by the motion of her long arms and tall body, by her hands especially, which often counterpointed her spoken words with their own symbolic gestures. Sometimes these gestures seemed intentionally histrionic, a stylized lexicon, yet there was something more too: a snaky playfulness more often than not, that seemed to ask, How seriously do you take me? On Thursday night, as part of her performance poem, "The Experts," she would open with words that included these: "We are not the petty bureaucrats of pleasure...[but] priests perfumed and serene... the hands that heal." From Wednesday's show, the telling image that remains for me of Albertano is her work with semaphore flags audibly snapping out an S.O.S. throughout a love poem. I can't recall clearly the verbal content, and that raises an interesting point: so much can be happening simultaneously in Performance Poetry that one's enjoyment might depend on relinquishing a linear approach to "understanding." The work is by definition holistic, and its effects have at least as much to do with how the performer is in her body as with what words she actually speaks. Of the three artists, Albertano's work relied most on forceful body language and an actor's voice. At a show by Nearly Fatal Women some of you might be uneasy, not knowing what to make of the artists' performance-inflected approach to poetry. You might ask: Shouldn't a poem be a highly structured verbal expression primarily? Shouldn't a text be sacrosanct insofar as it is made intentionally, its quality evidenced independently of audience response to the author in person (or the author in mind), and so, moreover, demanding a careful (i.e., private) reading and rereading? If you like. Or substitute some other theory of your choice. I'm talking about the primary impact of live performance: audience and artist are being together in time and space. Good Performance Art has to be more than an excuse for technical weakness as an actor or musician or poet, has to be more than exhibitionist self-indulgence, more than an emotional outpouring before an audience. In any genre, a fine artist communicates self-awareness as well as control of her material. In the Blues or the Gitano traditions, for example, "it's the singer not the song" that is most important, and the most valued moments are those when the performer becomes the message. This is what has stayed with me about Albertano's S.O.S.. I think that many Performance Poets such as the Nearly Fatal Women depend especially on their unique presence as the means by which to create an effective performance. Our bodies communicate directly with each other in all live settings - be they theaters or classrooms, doctors' offices, or automotive garages - and much more happens between us than what is verbally exchanged. With poetry in the form of a written text, more careful scrutiny of verbal content is allowed, and if it is well made, that attention can be very deeply rewarded. Poetry on the page depends upon the imaginative and sensory engagement of the private reading we give it in a kind of private performance - but a public performance asks us more directly how much we are willing to trust our senses, and a fine public reading by the author can guide us surely, quickly to the heart of the work. Do you believe you can intuit meanings, feel things directly and instantly through your body, and can continue feeling them without necessarily having a textual record called a "poem" to "study"? Let's go back to Poetry 101 for a moment: in the Western tradition, one route along which the lyric poem developed was the understanding that the personae of verse drama might speak directly for themselves without the apparatus of a plot to give them being. The persona is literally the mask worn by a character in the Greek drama, and in the post-psychoanalytic era we understand such a mask also as having to do with public personalities, with various socially defined roles that we play, and the like. If a lyric or narrative poem can be construed as a mask speaking, then we can see how modern poetry's roots are in the theater, and how directly poetry in performance can remind us that in life we are continually inter-acting with others according to some story line or other, either consciously or unconsciously in character. As far as I'm concerned, Performance Poetry is radical because it is simply a reminder of these fundamentals. If you want to read the poems, if they're available on the page, buy a copy of the book afterwards. It will be a different experience, but the presence of the author's voice might linger in the lines, to harmonize with your own reading. If you want more of the writer's performance, buy the audiotape, CD, or video - options that are becoming more and more common. Masks are often disturbing, altering our perceptions of reality and making plain the related impulses to transform ourselves and conceal ourselves. The resistance that I as an audience member sometimes feel toward poetry in performance is in the fact that it probably won't maintain the comfortable boundaries afforded by traditional theater or reading, or worse, in the name of something "new" or "experimental" I might be subjected to bad art. It's safer to meet the persona of the poet between the pages of a book, keeping a distance I can decide upon from that mask of printed words. Maybe I too can be embarrassed about this socially unapproved habit of mine, this love of poetry, all these conflicting feelings it touches, and can feel embarrassed when even the best poets mirror it back to me in person. I'm happy to say that the Nearly Fatal Women didn't let me off the hook easily. On Wednesday night I was probably most impressed by Laurel Ann Bogen's powerful recitations from memory of several long narrative poems. A physical contrast to Albertano, Bogen is shorter, stockier, dark, and with her oversized eyeglasses and big beret cuts her own kind of memorable figure in a floor-length velvet dress. Her voice is rich and resonant, distinct, with a hint of a lisp that has been welcomed home and made comfortable through long acquaintance. Like Albertano, Bogen's stage presence also feels trained, but here the performance is coming from a background in Speech and Oral Interpretation rather than one in music or theater. The poetry is all hers: confessional, funny, bizarre, surprisingly tender at unexpected moments. Each of these women knows how to use the talents she has and knows how to be in her own body. Bogen's gestures, while smaller than Albertano's, were also precise, fluid, forceful when they needed to be. I wonder if I was the only man in the audience compelled to reflect on how he looks at women's bodies, and especially women performers by the Nearly Fatals? I wonder if women in the audience reflected on their own ease with their physical presence and were inspired by the strength of this troupe? Among other things, Bogen is literary curator of the poetry series at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and she has had plenty of opportunity to see and hear major writers present their work. To say she knows what she's doing with her style of presentation is a bit of an understatement: as with every accomplished performer you get the feeling that it could only be done this way, and that the essence of the voice - I'm not talking here about vocalization per se, but about that ineffable quality without which one is not a writer - is best revealed when she takes it over-the-top, as in the hilarious finger-snapping rap-poem called "Mom & the Goldfish": This be the story of Mommm/ This be the story of Mommm/ This be the story of Mom she had the magenta hair/ She had the glass eye and the tupper-ware smile/ She had the look of the man who eat razorblade and liiiive/ . . . Mom be good mom/Mommm nurse Nathan Goldfish with cold compresses and mercurichrome/ Mom sing the lullabyyyee/ Mom show baby pictures of Mom/ Nathan he get better/ He start to sing Satisfaction and Love Minus Zero-No limit/ He be slightly outta hip date/ He say I need to spread fins/ He say I need to swim my way across USA/ Bathtub to bathtub/ He say, Mom I love your puce- by- now- it- was- hair, and your cackle when you walk/ I see you around like a donut/ But Mom she ain't gonna give up the good thing..." Wednesday night's show at the cafe was more intimate than what would follow on Thursday in the long, narrow lecture hall that now goes by the name of Kaufman Auditorium. On Wednesday, three women were presenting to an appreciative crowd downtown who were giving them something in return; on Thursday, most of the time, a theatrical ensemble was performing before an audience sitting quietly like good students in rows of seats. Thursday's hour and fifteen minute show had blocking, some lights, some salient props - e.g., flashlights, hubcap, carnations and altar to MM - and it was done almost entirely as the recititation of individual or choral pieces. Impressive stage business, to be sure. Overall, however, I didn't find it as moving as what was presented on Wednesday. Perhaps this was because the theatrics distracted from the poetry as the actors became impersonal, became "characters" rather than poets. This sacrificed the close-up feeling that emerged on Wednesday night by the time Suzanne Lummis, the third member of the troupe read to us her own work and also the poems of some other L.A. poets. In her off-stage life, Lummis, like her cohorts, wears various berets. She is the founding director of the L.A. Poetry Festival and has just edited and published the anthology Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Wirey in build, nervy, dark, her movements communicating something cagey and street-wise, sexy and aloof with a sort of secret angst, Lummis uses her thin frame and voice with just enough theatrical skill so as not to be overshadowed by her partners. The contrast is a good one, and in some ways Lummis looks and acts most the part of "poet." On Wednesday she brought into focus for me the regionalism of the Nearly Fatal Women. They could only be from L.A., where dreams are minted and burned, where both the faithful and the fallen angels have a place, where everybody is potentially a target for a freeway shooting, or is perhaps a pioneer discovering America all over again. Suzanne Lummis' "The Fahrenheit Chronicles" - accompanied by a "silent chorus" from Linda Albertano and Laurel Ann Bogen - was in many respects the highpoint of Thursday's show, largely because of the wit and the honest satire of love relationships this series of five poems offered. Laughter was consistently invited in by lines like these: "You were the B-movie I just had to sit through again." "She pays the ferryman and crosses into melodrama." "Anyway it was just an allegory...a little shift away from the denominator that was most common." "You were the flight of stairs I just had to fling myself down, the unlit room I entered with nothing but a struck match." Juxtaposed to Lummis' recitations, Albertano and Bogen were striking hieratic poses in the background; meanwhile, Lummis' own delivery and physical presence were communicating further meanings that kept the poems from wallowing in sentimental comedy or belieing themselves with cynicism. After the show Lummis told me these poems had lived on the page for a long time before she "took them out from behind the podium," and this remark helped clarify for me what I believe is the essential difference between most poetry readings and true performances. Performing poetry means putting your body up there in front of others - not necessarily in as theatrical ways as the Nearly Fatal Women do - but with body language as well as words, letting your audience know what it feels like to be inside your particular experience. We are powerfully drawn to identify with what is presented in this way. But recall what I have said about the way a mask can conceal a person as well as reveal a created persona; there's a fine line here any poet in performance ought to consider. Once a poem becomes a script for an actor, audiences assume a new set of expectations and a different kind of distance from both the performer and the poetry. Strictly speaking, I think that a straight-ahead poetry reading, whatever else it does, affirms primarily the poem's text as mask, as the made-thing that Pound and the Modernists have called our attention to. Still, any public reading is also a kind of performance - there's a fine line here that any public reader ought to consider - with the potential to make a writer and her works real in ways audiences seek. The word is given flesh in such a context. It bodies forth, bound to meet the Other, even when it is whispered softly to those waiting ears, a breathing thing, just now having risen from the page. Peter Fortunato performs with the spoken word and music group Spirit Horses.