Response to Allan Wolf

I think that this performance works because Allan is very engaging with the families. He runs off stage to interact with the children and the adults. It also helps that he does his own music instead of having a recording. He is a one man show.

Allan Wolf works by using verse of his own as well as poems of famous poets. He takes these poems and adds his own unique blend of music, humor and what I'd like to call theater to the poetry to create his performance. In his poems there is a lot of rhyming, expression and a flow that lends itself to this kind of work.

In this video I definitely admire the humor of Allan Wolf. He seems like he is able to make people forget they are listening to poetry. I also like his exaggerated expressions and poses. I am not sure of his background, but it almost appears as if he had some training in theater or I could be way off base and he is just great at mimicking other people.

As far as what is not good I would say that while it was humorous to watch the theater-esque performance, sometimes I felt that it was too over the top and I found myself more intently focused on that than the poetry. But then again, I'm not all that familiar with this medium so maybe thats what is supposed to happen.

I felt that this was poetry as well as a performance because some of the poems Wolf used were created as written poem, probably, not intending for them to be performed in the way Wolf did. An example of this is 'Fog'. Also, you can hear the different stanzas as he goes through his poems, he is adding rhymes, and creating rhythms with word choice. What makes it performance though, is his ability to bring the poems to the people, get them engaged, laughing and a part of the process.