Andy Weil - a listening experience

This writing formerly published in the Granby Drummer

Weil, a self- identified Type A personality (my cylinders are firing all the time) and brutal cynic (technology is destroying the country: ipads, youpads, blackberries, blueberries), is a performance poet.  Performance poetry is written specifically to be read to an audience.  Webexhibits.org/poetry speaks of performance poetry as “using the stage as the page, transforming poetry readings into theatrical events… engaging an audience in a listening experience”.  Weil has a passion for writing poetry and parodies and creating humorous dramatic effects, often accompanied by drum solos. He is also an accomplished percussionist.  He carried a union card at 16 and played professionally during his twenties.  A former theatre major, he is not afraid of an audience.  He stands up, locks eyes with his audience, reads to them and they laugh.    He does most of his performance/readings at assisted living facilities and senior centers (he says he is also available for Tupperware parties, divorce proceedings, new parking meter installations and dysfunctional relatives).

Weil got started in this life three years ago as a result of reading some of his poetry to his mother and her friends who were in an assisted living facility.  The staff was taken with his energy and rapport with the residents and suggested that he bring his “show” to other facilities – and he was launched.      

T.S.Elliot once said something to the effect that the “meaning” of a poem may be to divert and quiet the reader's mind while the poem works on him in the background, much as the burglar

throws a bone to a guard dog to distract him while he does his real work round the back.  Suffice it to say that Andy Weil’s poetry stops at the guard dog.  There is no back yard.  Sometimes the dog ignores the bone and keeps snarling. 

 Weil is not much of an abstract thinker: “What makes it work for me is my delivery and what I bring from the gut, my passion, -  they can feel and see it – that’s what puts me over”. 

 Weil relies on “epiphanies”, sudden intuitive leaps of presence and consciousness that he experiences during everyday occurrences.  He might take notice of the workings of a grandfather clock or observe people attending a wake or maybe a fly landing on a table.  It is the resource on which he most relies,  the genesis of what he writes about. 

Whereas logic would suggest that writing a poem might start with a free flow of ideas that would eventually give rise to an appropriate title, Weil says he doesn’t work this way.  Upon some sudden inspiration he jots a title down on a piece of paper and then writes a poem to fit the title – “first the title, then the poem follows in my head”.  Putting it on paper (the clarity of it, he says, is almost like someone dictating to him) is a sense of release.  Of course, he adds, “there are poems that write themselves.  You are outside of your body watching yourself write it.  Those are the poems that are very special”. 

Poetic structure calls forth such attributes as alliteration, meter, repetition, sound, spatial relationships - none of these are issues for Weil.  It is not that he is unaware.  It is just that these things are easy for him, especially the sound, the rhythm of the piece, given his percussion background. He says he doesn’t’ get writer’s block.  He never gets in a rut where he can’t work.  Every experience, every  sight, every encounter, every really stupid advertisement gets his mind roiling, and now he has a title to work with and he is suddenly sitting at a  corner table in a restaurant writing hard and fast. 

Writers like Emily Dickenson and Thoreau don’t do much for him.  Dickenson annoys the hell out of him with her sudden change of cadence.  He is mostly influenced, has been influenced, by song lyrics of life experiences sitting astride a beautiful melody.  Musicians and poets both set their poems to sound.

His performance readings eventually resulted in his program which he calls Senior Voices.  Senior Voices encourages folks to express themselves through poetry, to paint pictures with words.  Weil says, “Seniors in retirement facilities often exist in a routine that is both boring and non-stimulating”.  Weil continues “I encourage stimulation by urging them to express their feelings about things that they see every day.  “Why don’t you tell the world how you feel about the beautiful day outside; feelings about moving from the home in you raised your children;  feelings about the death of your husband”. Their opening comment is usually "Oh, I'm sure you're not going to think much of this”. What follows is sometimes a deep discovery of something within themselves.

 “Sometimes I will ask them to write down four words; it doesn’t matter what the words are.  They don’t even have to make sense.  There are no rules”.  A woman who had recently been moved to the facility about a week later chose a word and then wrote, “I wonder if my home knows where I have gone?”  Listen to that:  “I wonder if my home knows where I have gone?”  She shares that and she is no longer alone in the room - everyone else immediately identifies with her.  For that moment she, and they, are no longer alone.  They feel physically and emotionally lighter and Weil made that happen.  He created that moment.  It wasn’t bingo.

“I thought it was my imagination, but during my first year of doing this I discovered that there was an actual physical as well as emotional change in most people I worked with; increased energy, less angst, and a new self realization”. 

 You can contact Weil at 860 543 – 5870 or reach him at Candyman1353@aol.com  You can also watch him on Youtube – “promo for Andy Weil”.