Looking at the audience while doing a poetry reading, I saw some of the people have closed their eyes. Were they listening or were they sleeping? It was hard to tell.
I like to make eye-contact when I read. It’s like having a dialogue, you know the audience is listening. But when their eyes are closed I am uncertain. Should I project my voice to wake them up, or should I speak gently so as not to disturb them?
Teaching a piano lesson after a tiring exercise class, I listened to my student’s playing with my eyes closed. When the music stopped, I was so fatigued that my eyes would not open. “It’s nice,” I managed to mumble something to cover my track, but my mind was blank.
“Thank you. That’s it.” I said after my reading. People clapped. Now their eyes were all opened.
Allow me to weigh in on this. First, a gently closed set of lids by themselves are not indicative, of course. However the body language of the listener speaks volumes. I mean to say, just because someone is alert and open eyed does not mean that he or she is more than partially aware of you or exactly what it is you are saying and Internally sourced distractions are hardly discernible, if the person is at least being polite. Contrast these considerations to having a given audience member slumped over and snoring. That is an altogether different world. However, I recall one time when I went to an all night live music presentation. It was a wonderful experience to be able to sleep in a place surrounded by friends playing or singing softly. So there is a middle ground to my way of thinking and body language is the primary clue and easily interpreted, of course audience response, laughter, also hard to read, sighs or sidebar each provide evidence for example – beyond the concluding applause which is usually hard to read as regards whether or not you were heard. So there are considerations.
Were their ears open? Mine were. But I should think that the point of a poetry reading is to wake people up–if to nothing else than their own unused capacities.
Didn’t take my eyes and ears off of you and Bill for a second Clara. You were rivetting. You always are.
Something further. Freud says somewhere that we weren’t born to keep secrets. You can FEEL the attention level in a room as you read a poem, and feel when it lessens. It’s like a hum, except that I don’t mean that it’s a noise. A feeling–collective attention is like that. You know it when you have their interest, and you know that you can play upon that interest. Possibly it’s the way they look at you, possibly it’s a slight stiffening of bodies, people sitting up a little straighter–but you know. It’s what the Beowulf poet got when he said “Hwaet.”