In conversation with Obsidian Fellows, Elontra Hall and Sim Pereira-Madder, on performance in poetry and life

Our co-editor, Josiane Smith, asked two friends and Obsidian Fellows, Elontra Hall and Sim Pereira-Madder, to join her in exploring how performance plays out in our lives as people and as poets. They uncover the ways in which performance is about much more than entertainment – about deceit and deeper emotional truth, also as a vehicle for understanding our relationship to our audiences, our roots and the issues we believe matter in the world.

Josiane Smith: Our call for submissions set the tone for the kinds of topics and tensions we wished poets might explore. It wasn’t just about performance as a style of poetry or other expressive arts, but about performance as a lens through which we ask deeper questions about what it means to be an observer, or to be observed, a truth teller or a pretender, about the roles we play to get by, and what happens when the masks finally drop. What about this call for submissions resonated most with you?

Elontra Hall: I liked Shakespeare’s idea that “all the world’s a stage”. He’s saying that the play itself is not just on a stage, but your lives themselves are a play. For me, that means you’ve got a limited amount of time and you’ve got to make the most of all the different roles that you’re given in life. Hermann Hesse’s quote is interesting too. He says “how many times have you lied?” Society thinks about lying as a grey area. And performance, to me, is definitely a form of deception. It’s a consensual deceit.

JS: Where’s the consensual deceit in performance for
you?

EH: The consensual deceit is that I’m not nervous. I’m going to pretend that I feel great and then you’ll feel great and maybe that will affect how I feel. And the audience are definitely often saying “we’re going to pretend that you’re this guy for the night.” Sometimes the poem requires a particular emotional tone and weight, which I might not feel in that moment, but I have to embody it in order to share that with them. By engaging in this, we might be able to come together to reveal a deeper emotional truth.

JS: It almost feels like an oxymoron to talk about ‘performance’ in the same breath as ‘truth’. How do you get to that “deeper, emotional” place in your poetry?

EH: My feelings about that have evolved over time. Initially, doing slams in the US, I always had this attitude like, “I’m going to knock your socks off. You’re going to give me all 10s and you’re going to forget about everyone else before me because they’re nowhere near as good as me.” And now, I just focus on the best words that I can write and if it resonates with me, it’s likely
going to resonate with somebody else.

JS: How has your relationship to performance changed over the years, Sim?

Sim Pereira-Madder: I go for conversational or deadpan speech as much as possible in my performances now, otherwise there is a tendency to perform like “this is the thing, this is how you read it, this is my answer to the question, though nobody has asked it”. It’s my attempt to show people that stuff is not set. If people don’t know what’s going on, they can’t listen to the poet as an authoritative voice on the world. And maybe it helps them to realise that what they’re
hearing is never the whole story; it’s always messier. So there’s something about giving your audience credit; it’s up to them to pick out bits of meaning. I hope I allow space for that. It’s exactly the same with the page – I used to think I was a poet purely for the page: the visuals, spacing, and line lengths were quite important to me. I think about all that a lot less now. The poems I’m currently writing look like prose, big blocks. It could be because I stopped caring about the visual, or because I want the reader to do a lot of work. Hanif Abdurraqib has a poem about a dog barking at him in the street and uses slashes as line breaks; it’s a block text. I get that impulse to lose the reader in the text, not guide them.

EH: This makes me think of Fran Lock’s book, Hyena! Jackal! Dog!: how swiftly she moves through images; how different ideas feed into each other. I want to do something like that. From my own poems, I have one called Hoop – it is honestly like an unwieldy child. She’s quick and she takes a toll on me. Each time I read it, I read it slightly differently.

JS: I also have a block poem which I’ve only read out to an audience twice, and it was so hard! On the page, it’s the perfect form, but to be read out loud, it takes a whole different rhythm, and gaze.

SPM: Absolutely. For me block texts are all about breathing, and I’m often realising I’ve run out of air or that I’ve been keeping the air in the top half of my body the whole time. They are hard to read and to read out.

EH: And now I recognise that as a poet, giving from a place of deep emotion, showing that level of presence, can burn you out if you get nothing back from it. These days, I’m literally always on a kind of stage as a teacher. I’m tossing out jokes and anecdotes to get my class to go somewhere with me. I’m constantly sharing and putting things out there in order to get something back. Their reaction is energising to me.

JS: Reaction to a performance is definitely a large part of what makes the performance what it is, and in that way the audience becomes an active, not passive, part of the process.

SPM: As much as I said I want to make the audience do a lot of work, I will also feed the audience what I think they are going to want. I want to see how an audience responds to something – and sometimes they surprise me. The audience is a litmus test. What does an audience get in this that I didn’t see?

EH: Initially though, the responsibility is on the poet – you’ve got to earn your audience’s attention, and you do that with the words and with the way you share with them.

SPM: Exactly. How I usually read the room is that when the audience are losing interest, they are moving; when no one is moving, shuffling, coughing, I know I’ve got it, that whatever it is I’m doing right now, people are with me, they want to know what’s happening next. It’s a generous act for the audience to be present with you; it’s something that you can betray too. This instinct of working to get the audience’s attention can be thrown away so easily in a gag.

JS: Like we were saying earlier about conceptual deceit and now about betrayal, our discussion about performance reinforces this question of what makes something true or not. And the poems we most enjoyed reading for this collection were ones that did not shy away from their own experience, whatever that happened to be.

SPM: Yes. For me, the call for submissions brought up this idea of the ‘performative’ as everything we do on a daily basis – as people not just as poets – in how we speak/dress/behave in front of our colleagues, in how we’re always trying to say the right thing in front of our parents or partner for example. You inhabit different skins. Personally, I’m caught in that space of being half-Brazilian, half-British, as well as many other versions of me. ‘Performative’ is something I’m conscious of generally. In one of my poems, Caballo (Horse meat), I’m asking questions about whether feelings are facts or not and what the poem risks – either too much or too little. It creates the feeling of an eclipse.

JS: Eclipse is such an evocative image to describe the way something can be two things at once (a whole planetary object and a complete shadow of the sun). I wonder how being a person of mixed heritage affects the question of authenticity, or the ‘true’ self for you, Sim?

SPM: I’m not sure I agree with the idea of there being a true self – there are many acceptable true selves. But sometimes I recognise that I can’t write the thing that I am maybe thinking about because I’m not sure of it myself. And it’s probably fair to say that we attach certain criteria, certain behaviours to notions of ‘true’ selves whether we like it or not (like “I am a good father”, “I am a studious student”, “I am a good poet”). It’s easy to beat ourselves up about not meeting these standards, and fighting internally all the time. But you’re probably not good at playing these roles all the time; there’s always compromises to make and different versions of ourselves for different audiences.

EH: Sometimes while excelling in one role, you’re bombing in another.

JS: Right. It’s interesting, Sim, you used terms like “beating ourselves up” and “fight” here. And then Elontra, the word “bombing”. It’s easy to associate performance with entertainment, but I hadn’t considered the more aggressive, violent or defensive aspects of performance. Can you say more about your choice of words there?

SPM: I guess sometimes it can feel like a fight between what you feel like doing and the thing you feel you have to do. Being in predominantly white, potentially hostile, spaces, where I can probably pass, I still pay a lot of attention to language (not necessarily because they are racist spaces, but I’m just aware that they might have consequences for me, my family or career). There’s a line in one of my poems, The Sum of all Knowledge, in which I write, “I learned to be polite and quiet so strangers or church folk would think well of me.” It was very important to my parents that we learned good table manners in order for us to not stick out as too ‘other’; to minimise the threat and risks of alienation, or worse. So now I definitely inhabit my best English and show the politest version of myself – and that experience is certainly not limited to mixed race people.

JS: Performance as self-censoring, as politeness. Do you find yourself reflecting how you were raised in your work? Has it been hard to unlearn this coping mechanism, in order to get to another version of authenticity, of telling your own story in your own way?

SPM: I’ve found that contemporary poets have this bent towards authenticity, towards truth – they want to tell their own story, as you say, and in order to do so, they have to keep to the chronology, to the facts of events. It’s quite common and I have it too and I struggle with it – the idea of not being “allowed” to perform in the poem. It feels as though editorial or curatorial input around something that happened would be untrue. Karl Ove Knausgård wrote a long series of unflinchingly honest books about his life including everything he hated, including family members and intimate relationships. He takes this idea of authenticity, of telling your own story, to the absolute extreme. For me, there are always things beyond the line. Can you say that you don’t like your kids as a mum? About your kids who are still alive? To write that and to have it
published… would it not cost too much? What would happen if there wasn’t an edit? All poets have a line that they negotiate without being too direct, and yet without avoiding the truth.

EH: This conversation reminds me of a game we used to play as kids in Detroit neighbourhoods called ‘Mercy’, where we’d interlace fingers with another kid’s and try to press forward and down, applying painful pressure in the wrist until one person’s hands have been twisted enough that they cannot stand the pain. When that happens, they forfeit by saying “mercy”, ending the game. It’s how you let people know who’s in charge. In that game, there’s performance as well as a harsh teaching that this is how life pushes again and again until you don’t get up/give up.

JS: Sometimes we don’t know what we’re being asked to perform, or even realise how exactly we’ve been performing, until the context changes. You’re from Detroit, right Elontra? In what way has that city informed your notions of performance?

EH: Detroit is always with me, as is my love of the basketball I played back there as a kid. A poem I’m currently working on is inspired by J. Dilla, who was a producer from Detroit who passed away in 2006. He created his own sound and people were astounded by how he did it. I’m trying to write sonnets in the way that Dilla would produce sounds. The city comes out in strange ways in the work sometimes. I’m looking to bring more of me into a poem, so I look at where I’m using language to cover and where instead I can be authentically me. Knowing who I am and where I come from allows me to stay grounded and holds me to my truth. These are my people and this is how they connect with me.

JS: One of our published poets, Arun Jeeto, writes in his own poem, My People, that “The people of my tribe eat mangos and hot wings / and are happiest when they can exist beyond erasure”. What does this line mean to you in terms of how we perform ourselves on and off stage?

SPM: In every edit, you choose what you’re showing or not, emphasising certain things or not. The internal bit of performance fascinates me – the bits you edit out are the bits you don’t want to show. But that can happen across cultures, too. My wife is from Colombia and she says there’s always a moment that something shifts at a party – when British people are no longer scared of being a truer version of themselves: “now the party has started” she says. It usually involves a great deal of alcohol for people to become people, and until that point, they’re presenting themselves as edits.

EH: And then of course, there’s the bits that are edited out for you, as in erased purposefully. These kinds of erasures happen all of the time. I think of Hanif Abdurraqib’s collection, There’s Always This Year which shows how in many ways the deaths of Black people are simply footnotes in America’s long history and present day struggles.

JS: That’s a powerful statement. How do you think a poem can extend beyond itself, for instance into advancing social justice or our spiritual lives?

EH: I can remember once reading out a poem that I had written at the university, and a student came up to me afterwards and said she wanted to choreograph a dance to it. So when we talk about performance poetry, let’s also recognise how it can move off the page and impact other spaces. That poem found a way to translate into movement. But not just physical movement. So many of the poets I’ve seen have been speaking to this global movement, to stop what’s happening in Israel, Palestine, Congo, Sudan – that’s a strong thing.

SPM: I’d probably use the phrase responsibility. It’s easy for us to write nice things, and for people to give applause because “we are great at words”, but if the poet is only doing that, they are missing a trick. There is value in the beauty of art, full stop. But the person has to have a heart; they have to be responsible in the world that they are in. It varies what poets speak to, of course. I think I struggle talking about race and identity and being overtly political because I think there are people who are doing a much better job of that than me.

EH: I saw Malika Booker recite a poem at Jawdance in order to give space to what’s happening in Gaza at the moment. There was a young man in the audience that night and it felt important for young minds like that to be exposed to a bigger conversation through poetry.

SPM: As a human you are responsible to other humans, your world, other communities – you’re responsible to a sense of truth. If your life is a certain way, write about how that is. You need to be vulnerable in your poetry – for me, that’s poetry’s first rule. When I see someone being fragile, it makes it ok for me to be fragile and ok to express my fragility. I guess I’m
coming at it from a more internal and mental health side of things – responsibility to share the things that are universal and difficult.

EH: Poems can be a door. We can use the poem to ease into a conversation that might have been more challenging. Poems enable us to drop our performance. I wrote a poem about my brother playing basketball in our backyard when he was a kid – it was about observing an essential part of who he is and then asking him back “do you see these qualities the way I see them? And if you do,” then asking “why are you adding other things into your life that don’t need to be there?” When I said ‘responsibility’ earlier, I was talking more about a generosity of allowing people to respond in a way that works for them, which Elontra speaks to there I think. The attitude of your heart when you write is the attitude of yourself; it’s something that can be felt. And that travels. What I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about writing isn’t how can I make a correct statement, I’m thinking about human kindness, because there isn’t enough of that in the world.

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Elontra Hall – a Black-American poet based in Northampton – centres much of his work around fatherhood, basketball, relationships and identity. He has been published in HeadFake, Butcher’s Dog (16), Magma (82, 87), Propel (6), had work broadcast on BBC 4’s Poetry Please (Christmas 2022) and has work forthcoming in Shō and Prairie Schooner. He is a student on the Poetry School MA in conjunction with Newcastle University as well as the holder of its Scholarship to an outstanding candidate for the 2023–2025 cohort. He is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow and a member of both Griot’s Well and The Watering Hole.

Sim Pereira-Madder is a London based poet writing on otherness, repair and the domestic realm. An Obsidian Foundation alum and current Poetry School intern, his work appears or is forthcoming in Propel Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, La Piccioletta Barca and Wet Grain. He just wrote his first short play, and you can find him on instagram at @threetruewords

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From Magma 89, Performance

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