Poetry in Bars: A Slurred Manifesto

By David Macpherson

Is there poetry in bars?

 

You bet there is! Sometimes it is a drunk on a stool bragging. That's poetry. But other times, bars can host a poetry reading. Is that a good idea? Sure. Why not!

 

What you have here is a book that shows you why and how to make a poetry reading in a bar. It goes through setting it up and running it. You can read this book and decide that you too want to run a poetry reading at a bar. And that's great. The world needs more drunken poetry readings!

 

David Macpherson has been the host of bar based poetry readings for over a decade and he is more than willing to sober up enough to let you know the ins and outs of running one of these spoken word events. It is an irreverent look at poetry and bars.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Apr 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201709426

Book preview

Can You Have Poetry In Bars?

Of course you can have poetry in bars. Actually. You can’t have a bar without poetry. Poetry has been part of the concept of bar life since the beginning.

We are not talking about the old concept of the wandering storyteller going into the beer hall and telling a long poem of a great hero, like Beowulf or Gilgamesh or Urkel. Poetry is there, but it’s something more basic than that.

The moment that one guy decided that he didn’t need his old lady and he could just stay here and drink all night, he was performing poetry. Not very original poetry, but it scans. It sings. Complaining about the job, the kids, the woman who never calls. All of it is poetry. It is possible that you can only appreciate it when you are as wasted as the poet. It is the sympathy between poet and audience.

The audience of this bar poetry needs to be as gone as the words they might be hearing.

The way the bartender asks what is wanted. The way they coax out the proper desire in the customer. Poetry. Poetry designed to get money thrown on the bar, but what poet is against coins tossed upon the floor?

The drinks themselves can be poetry. They can go down easy. They might be pretty to look at. They can kick. They can stay with you until the next day when the very poem squeezes the brain to be remembered. To never be forgotten.

Anyone who says that a hangover isn’t a poem, doesn’t understand the concepts of beauty and destruction.

Look behind the bar and see all the bottles just waiting to be poured together into new lines and meters. To go down smooth like a metaphor that doesn’t need your help to be true.

The bar is a poem. It stands to reason that we want to recite poetry here. To listen to another person’s barstool sonnet. It’s not easy to get good poetry in a bar, but don’t ever say that poetry doesn’t exist here. It’s soaking in the floorboards like so much spilled beer.

Can there be spontaneous poetic recitation in a bar?

Are we talking about a guy pushing himself off the stool and just reciting a poem he wrote or drunkenly thought he wrote? Absolutely, that can happen. It has to happen. Sometimes there are types of whiskey that can nudge a fella to recite poetry. Not the good stuff though. The good top shelf stuff is free of nitrates and poetry.

Now how will the other bar goers respond to this act of poesy? It depends on if they know the person.  It depends if that's the kind of bar that allows you to be spontaneous and kooky. If you do such a thing, you have to find a very understanding bar. There are some neighborhood bars we know of where they definitely cut you off and ask you to leave, but that's always the risk of performing art in public, isn't it?

There is a subset to reciting poetry at a bar where you are trying to impress someone worth winning over or maybe you would like to go home with them. We must discourage this. Poetry has been utilized to woo people for ages and at times is successful, but doing it at a bar to impress a woman or a man is never a good idea.  They might greet you with confusion and pity and that's never a good look.

Though there are great ways to get yourself a cuddle, it should not be done by sidling up to someone and reading them the Emily Dickinson poem that you sort of, kinda remember. We know several establishments that have implemented a strict policy that bans use of poetry in their bar during a date. And in this one case, we do applaud this drunken censorship.

There are times where they might applaud your bravery to recite poetry and you're validated for it for