A Plea to the Moaners

The Pill goes to a lot of poetry readings. This is a fact about which one feels some ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s sometimes interesting to hear how a poet vocalizes the verbiage on the page (“interesting,” itself is a quality about which one feels some ambivalence; look out, gentle readers, for a post soon about the sing-song delivery? in which every line? ends on an upward inflection?), and it can be fun to see how a poet has changed since that jacket photo (or to see that clearly a model was hired for the jacket photo). On the other hand, sometimes a poet’s reading wrecks a poem, or the patter between poems drains the enlivening mystery from a poem.

And then there are the moaners.

You’ve heard them if you’ve gone to many readings at all. The poet (all too often with a rising inflection? or a heightened . . . breathiness . . . during . . . the . . . exaggerated . . . pauses . . . between . . . words) delivers an image, a metaphor, a turn of phrase that either really or, in the flawed judgment of both poet and audience, is striking, and a few in attendance “hmmm” with approval or almost erotic satisfaction. (It’s not that the Pill is never similarly moved; the sound I’m describing is like the one that involuntarily escapes me when, after a couple of meatless months, I bite into, say, an Arthur Bryant’s sliced beef sandwich.)

I once spent some time unscientifically surveying the moany terrain, trying to determine during readings which, whether, and why. Alas, this loose cartesianism, this unsystematic empirical study, produced no conclusive findings, and what can you expect when the phenomenon occurred not only among the couple thousand at one of Gwendolyn Brooks’s last readings or the hundreds at one of Stanley Kunitz’s – at that one, your correspondent felt as if surrounded by a flock of cooing doves, indeed felt this so strongly that he checked his shoulders afterwards for dabs of bird shit – and also among the dozens enduring (too many with pleasure, at which the Pill despaired) Marie Howe or Spencer Reese or a Dickman.

One hesitates to ascribe motives to the moaners, and one assumes there are in fact a multiplicity thereof. Some, surely, moan out of authentic emotional experience. Others, perhaps, assume the position of respondents in a sort of amen corner (“Preach it, brother!”) and see it as their duty to take up an antiphonal role, confirming the poet in his or her sense of being filled by the spirit. Many, though, I am convinced, are simply conducting their own performance, letting those around them know that yes, they had the proper emotional experience (like the guy who laughs at the just smile-worthy joke so everybody knows he gets it).

To each, regardless of a given moaner’s etiology, the Pill politely asks “Can you please f*cking stop that?!” I promise on behalf of those of us enjoying the silence at the ends of lines and phrases (whether because the silence lets us absorb the power of what precedes it or because we’re just glad the poet stopped) that we will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you get it. I promise the poets are sufficiently confident in the movement of the muse within their words that they’ll get by without your cooing confirmation. And if you’re simply moved involuntarily, I’m working on a patentable nose plug that will convert the moaning exhalation into just enough electricity to administer a mild shock so we can condition you to keep it to yourself.

Listen to the silence, people, please. Let it ring on.