Performance poem critique

I admired several of Tim Siebel’s performance poems on You Tube, Tim Siebel -10 - Check Outside -Poetry worked because of the tone, and attitude and purpose of his dramatic interpretation performance that can be vaguely defined as a response to the Dah Lak performance relative to it on You Tube; demonstrating a complete counterpoint in style, diction and imagery to the Dah Lak poem; it struck me as a polished professional demonstration of a skill long developed with practice and performance; the more I got into it I realized the complexity of the tapestry he was tapping into.

Tim Siebel reminds me of Dan Ackroyd one of my all time favorite comedy actors who I believe succeeds because of his craftmanship and methodic acting. What makes Tim’s performance ‘work’ for me is his very effective delivery of a dramatic monologue using voice tonality that is controlled, analytical and diagnostic; it creates images, territory and borders of interest like the news media does: reporting the news and weather from its perspective (like the Weathermen, and Panthers?) on a moment to moment basis; alerting the public to deal with whatever alarming signs, songs, police sirens that might be ringing out of some sense of outrage that might lead to flashes of anarchy. Tim’s controlled performance is decorous counterpoint to anarchy of the Dah Lak poems; the ‘fearsome’ symbol laden media is sublimated to his remarkable oral interpretation, debunking the persistent suggestion there is something to fear besides fear itself.


He maintains a conservative poet image but that is refreshing; as Parra states poetry is offering improvements on the blank page; on the contrary in the Abyss video (on the same URL that relates to the Dah Lak poem) - the guitar sounded abysmal out of tune perhaps deliberately so Isaiah would sound better in his hip hop vocal. It was a very incongruous a bit grotesque URL that would have better been left blank. On the other hand I thought Tim S__ could have used a multimedia screen image behind him like that used in the Abyss video: perhaps Jacques Louis David’s, ‘ Socrates’

Tim’s is the best pure example of both a performance and a poem I found, because obviously the material object is represented in the person of the poet, lyrics, images, themes past and present, voice, drama; it is a skilled artistic performance based on and because of the poet’s dramatic use of tone, inflection, meter and rhythm (he actually moved as he spoke miming a man at work) that elevates it to the different form of reality I am looking for that separates popular from serious art.