When I got into my moving truck to leave the East Coast, I didn’t think I was coming to Madison as much as I thought; damn, I’m leaving New York. I always thought or was told that New York City is the place where you could make a name for yourself as a poet and bring credibility to your artistic visions. After attending several readings around NYC, I realized that this was not the case. So much of the poetry was based in performance and spectacle, where the merits of your words were determined by how much they liked you, not the poem itself. I started to question whether I wanted to continue on stage in front of a mic and whether what I was doing was poetry at all. Yet despite all my misgivings about the New York scene, it still held the classic promise of poetic potential. My experiences, however, had led me to ask myself what can we do to make poetry readings and art more accessible to the general public, even to make it an enjoyable part of people’s everyday lives. I began to look at Madison as a clean slate; a blank piece of paper in front of me, and I wanted to have some say in writing the story upon it. Madison has always had a thriving art and poetry community, stretching long before PGI began or my arrival in town. A constant influx of university students and established groups of writers in the area support regular poetry readings at many of the bars and coffee shops in the downtown area as well as in many of the larger suburban bookstores. Apart from these, the University has a very active creative writing department and publishes the poetry journal The Madison Review. Although there are many different venues to read and listen to poetry, the crowds that go to one type don’t necessarily frequent the others. “Madison could use some cross pollination between the different scenes. There is certainly room for it,” remarked Rusty Russell, MC of the ‘Cheap At Any Price’ poetry readings held downtown at the Café Montmartre. Every scene has its own style as well as audience. There are featured readers, straight open mics, and mixtures of music and poetry. The readings that mix music and poetry are particularly frustrating because the poetry is often read in between the songs and the audience is too busy talking and not paying attention. There are also the performanceoriented poetry slams where the audience judges the poem and the poet receiving the highest score is the winner. “I’m not all that enamored of [poetry] slamming, it started out as a gimmick to get people up and doing poetry; I don’t care for the circus barker role I have to take when I’m MCing these things,” confessed Rusty. While a slam encourages audience participation and gets more people involved, it is a different kind of experience. “The downside [of a slam] is that the poetry starts to get more bombastic because people want to be entertaining instead of doing art,” concluded Rusty. He added that Madison, unlike Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York City has not yet focused intensely on slam poetry but he fears that this could happen in the future. In these other cities you could go to a million slams and not hear more than three or four true poems. There are many different schools of thought on how poetry should be communicated and received. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky feels that poetry is a solitary private enjoyment where you interact with the poemwithout anyone else. I believe the written word and the spoken word are two very different but equally effective methods of rendering poetry. There are ideas that do not come across on paper that come across clearly when vocalized and vice versa. The written word allows the writer to make use of spacing and the reader can reread the poem and find new ideas and concepts in it every time. The spoken word allows the reader to change the inflection of their voice, pause and bring themselves and their voice into the poem; it lets them speak directly to their audience and engage them. The concept of a poetry ‘reading’ is certainly of interest to Local Poet Jeannie Bergmann. She is the founder of the website madpoetry.org, which is a comprehensive listing of all readings, performances, slams, workshops, bookstores, poets and publications in the Madison area. “D.B. Appleton, another Wisconsin poet, said that ‘Poetry readings could more properly be considered poetry listenings.’ When you say ‘read’, you don’t know whether it is from the speaking end or from the looking end. I think we are really handicapped by the fact that the English language has no vocabulary to differentiate reading aloud from reading silently with eyes on a piece of paper.” commented Jeannie. The most difficult thing to do when you read your work out loud is to give the audience both the intimacy of reading your poems on paper and also the energy and personality of the voice behind the poem. Far too often in the poetry readings I have attended, I have seen this taken to extreme cases. Some people are so consumed by the personal nature of their written work that they are reading to the page instead of to the people. On the other side of the spectrum, some readers put so much energy and personality into their reading that their poems all begin to sound the sameand you only hear their voice, not their words. Although producing the written word and the spoken word are two separate processes they must be combined carefully in a manner to keep the audience engaged. The reason I think more people don’t go to poetry readings is because the writers do not pay equal attention to achieving a harmony between the words they write and the words they speak. There are a substantial number of minorities in Madison yet the crowds that do attend poetry readings here tend to be homogenous, white and collegeeducated. Despite Madison having a reputation as a progressive and accepting town there are few hiphop and bilingual performers at the open mics. Even beyond the ideas of race and class, poetry and poets should make a serious attempt to reach everyone in the community. “Madison should be a richer, more supportive place for a broader range of poetry than perhaps it has been. I’d like to make the extent of that range more visible to a broader audience. I think there should be different venues for different interests; however people should always be aware that there is a spectrum of activities and publication taking place,” said Jeannie. Poetry is the most basic form of communication: words written and spoken; every time we speak and express ourselves there is poetry in what we say and the way we live our lives. Poetry readings bring people together and get them to interact and share ideas. They create community and get us out of our houses, out from under our televisions, and speaking to each other face to face like real people. Yogesh Chawla June 2001 Madison WI Please email PGI at poetry@premieregeneration.com to reprint or distribute this article