OFF BY HEART - republishing a POF article from January 2006 on memorising your poems

OFF BY HEART - Does it make a difference if we perform from memory?

I still remember the sense of awe and stunned admiration I felt when, on an Arvon course back in the 90s, I first saw Philip Wells - the Fire Poet - perform some of his poetry. He’s a superb performer and his material is both deeply mythic and utterly contemporary, but it was not what he performed that made the most impact on me that day, but the way he performed it. For it was the first time I had ever seen somebody stand up in front of an audience and read his own work from memory. It was a wake-up call, but one I've been pushing back to snooze for the past ten years. Now that I’ve started looking more seriously at stand-up techniques in an effort to improve my own performance as a reader, perhaps it’s time to take a leaf out of Philip’s book and memorise my work.

Let's face it, there are few things more terrifying than walking up to a microphone in front of a live audience and having to perform your own work, even with the poems written down for you. Just the knowledge that I’ve agreed to do that or decided to make an appearance at some Open Mic event can make me feel physically sick for days in advance. However, I used to feel like that before playing competitive snooker too, so perhaps that reaction says more about me and my own peculiar hang-ups to do with display and competitiveness than some common fear of public speaking.

It’s not always that bad, of course - small home crowds are easier to face than big city gigs packed with strange faces - but even when I think I’ve got my fear under control, it often resurfaces in some way: stomach cramps for a day or so beforehand, an inability to eat on the day, sudden cotton-mouth when I walk up to the mic, my hands no longer under my control, shaking so badly I’m sure even the ones asleep at the back must have noticed.

And my voice? Croaky, squeaky or shrill, or worse, suddenly slurred as though I’ve been propping up the bar in the interval. I’m sure I can’t be alone in finding that my tongue grows at least half an inch thicker as soon as I approach a microphone. It must be one of the laws of performance theory that you only notice how many ‘f’s and ‘s’s are in close proximity in your poems when you’re called upon to deliver a line which comes out like a drunk reciting ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’

How much easier it would be if you didn’t have to hold a piece of paper in your hand, or a sheaf of papers, or a book. But of course, if you take away the printed word, it’s like taking away a security blanket. The usual reference point has vanished. Suddenly, the words have gone and you’re on your own. The audience is waiting. Your mind’s a blank. You don’t even remember which poems you wanted to perform, let alone how they start.

If it was terrifying before, when you had a book to hide behind, something to keep checking on while you read, nothing can describe how it feels to walk up to the mic empty-handed!

So what is the secret? How do performers like Philip Wells and many other stand-up experts manage to deal with this fear of losing the visual text? Well, I suppose the simple answer is that they can see no other way of performing and so they practise, practise, practise - alone and in front of an audience, even if it’s just the dog - until they’re word-perfect and have all those memory tricks down cold, the mnemonics or mental tags that help us remember what comes next in a verbal sequence like poetry. Nerves go with the territory, after all, and it must be liberating to feel confident enough to step up and perform from the page in your head, the open text in your memory, a text that relies on a poet’s innate sense of rhythm to keep rolling off the tongue without faltering.

Besides, text changes when it’s memorised, have you noticed that? Not in physical terms - the words are still the same on the page, still exactly where you left them - but in oral and auditory terms. The poem starts to ‘feel’ different in your mouth, starts to take on a new shape in your mind. It always makes me think of Tony Harrison’s poem 'Fire-eater': 'Coarser stuff than silk they hauled up grammar/knotted together deep down in their gut', reminding me of how you pull words and phrases, the sense and rhythm of your poem, out of your mouth as you perform, dragging them out from god knows where, some ancient inner reservoir that pre-dates the written word.

When you memorise, instead of remembering where lines end or begin, you start to think about where to draw breath, where the emphasis lies, where the silences are between words, between lines, even between poems. The memorised work starts to have a new presence, one that takes it beyond the printed page. Now it’s out there, alive in the space between you and the audience, and you can’t take it back.

But poetry can’t perform that dance, it can’t come to life in those terms if it’s just read flatly from the page, if it’s never allowed to find its own rhythm in your mouth, in the way your body moves in performance, even in your eyes, the expression on your face, the sounds rising and falling and finding their own dynamic pathways to the audience without reference to something as stolid and inflexible as print.

So yes, I think it does make a difference if we perform from memory. But it also takes courage and determination; courage to face the audience without the safety net of the page, and determination because you’re bound to make mistakes in the beginning - though most people are probably gifted with a better memory than me or are better able to hide their mistakes with some smooth ad-libbing! - and you have to deal with that possibility. Luckily, I think the adrenalin and energy that come from facing our fear are motivating factors, bringing us back to the mic empty-handed again and again.