Kathleen Graber: thoughtful, careful, with an intermittently epic reach, sometimes too grounded. I bought her book because I wanted to get the best impression of her poetry. "The form of stone is the form of attrition. It becomes itself by what is lost."; "[...]delicate rigid body of a bird[...]"
Catherine Pierce: concrete, domestic, honest. From her love poem to America: "America teach me how to strut . . . I love how afterward you roll over and snore like a locomotive before I even catch my breath."
Shin Yu Pai: I didn't write anything down to quote. I learned from her that the food industry is bad-bad-bad!
[Christopher Stackhouse read after Pai, but I must have been sleeping after my one beer; I don't remember what I thought of him.]
John Keene: earnest, professorial. "Driving at what is arriving, you must parse it out."
Ross Gay: by turns terrifying (not him, but his poem about unspecified violent little creatures) and nastily funny (about his friend's racist girlfriend). From the former: "the little one sat curled in a lump pretending he was dead"; from the latter (the girlfriend, white, speaks to her black boyfriend about how he is not "street" enough): "What does your Hegel say about funk? Your Dubois? / I only date hood."
Daniel Nester: Definitely the guy I liked most. Funny, self-deprecating. When I went up to him afterward and asked him if he was selling anything, his look of mild surprise and unfeigned delight was a pleasure to behold. "I brought one copy of a book of mine, if you want to buy it for five dollars," he said - so I did. From a poem: "When I said you were as old as my mother I wasn't trying to make you old or make you my mother. I was trying to give you details."
Showing posts with label Reading Between A and B. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading Between A and B. Show all posts
2/1/08
10/27/06
Running language lightly over the sensorium
One fun poet out of three - not bad.
This week's Reading Between A and B made less of an impression than the last one I went to - maybe because I didn't have a nice chat afterwards to preserve it for later musing - but worthwhile nonetheless. Kathleen Ossip read from two thematic collections. The first, Cinephrastics, a book of movie poems, were at their best epigrammatic; at times I felt lost, because I don't know much about movies -- my fault, obviously. Another collection is set in the period of the Cold War. (So long ago!) It relied on an easy cliché, superficial suburban complacency beneath which roils a turbid undertow. (The work on the web site is more complicated and interesting than what she chose to read.)
Mary Jo Bang is well known and highly regarded, two risk factors for the Great Poet Syndrome: a tendency to orotund truisms (death is all around us, George Bush is a bad president), and an even more dreaded complication, the Great Poet Voice. (Imagine your most boring high school teacher. Then subtract intonation.) She also read from a thematic collection (these seem to be de rigueur), based on the letters of the alphabet. The most successful of these goes like this, in its entirety:
B is for Beckett
There is so little to say.
Here's another nice line of hers, plucked from context. It's about doctors. [I don't know where the line breaks go.] "How little else they know unless you tell them. I tell them I wish I could lie under the summer."
Chris Nealon, the middle poet, was entertainingly arch - qualities helped by his natural, fluid reading style. I appreciate poets that bring a persona to the microphone, and he was a jokester. Maybe his reading, his wit, his sexual jokes, can be identified with a "gay jester" type (Merrill, Powell). (If he's gay, that is. Maybe I'm wrong.) I wish I had more to quote, but he was reading pretty fast and I had had a bourbon to start the reading off (which I was well into by the time Nealon read. Maybe that's why I liked him the most?). A favorite line, again context-free: "She said: I want a tattoo. / She said, I want a thigh wound." Or the image of the city full of "instructible sparks." Or the title of this post, taken from a poem of his.
I would have bought his book, but the bourbon took up my free cash. I won't make that mistake again.
One fun poet out of three - not bad.
This week's Reading Between A and B made less of an impression than the last one I went to - maybe because I didn't have a nice chat afterwards to preserve it for later musing - but worthwhile nonetheless. Kathleen Ossip read from two thematic collections. The first, Cinephrastics, a book of movie poems, were at their best epigrammatic; at times I felt lost, because I don't know much about movies -- my fault, obviously. Another collection is set in the period of the Cold War. (So long ago!) It relied on an easy cliché, superficial suburban complacency beneath which roils a turbid undertow. (The work on the web site is more complicated and interesting than what she chose to read.)
Mary Jo Bang is well known and highly regarded, two risk factors for the Great Poet Syndrome: a tendency to orotund truisms (death is all around us, George Bush is a bad president), and an even more dreaded complication, the Great Poet Voice. (Imagine your most boring high school teacher. Then subtract intonation.) She also read from a thematic collection (these seem to be de rigueur), based on the letters of the alphabet. The most successful of these goes like this, in its entirety:
B is for Beckett
There is so little to say.
Here's another nice line of hers, plucked from context. It's about doctors. [I don't know where the line breaks go.] "How little else they know unless you tell them. I tell them I wish I could lie under the summer."
Chris Nealon, the middle poet, was entertainingly arch - qualities helped by his natural, fluid reading style. I appreciate poets that bring a persona to the microphone, and he was a jokester. Maybe his reading, his wit, his sexual jokes, can be identified with a "gay jester" type (Merrill, Powell). (If he's gay, that is. Maybe I'm wrong.) I wish I had more to quote, but he was reading pretty fast and I had had a bourbon to start the reading off (which I was well into by the time Nealon read. Maybe that's why I liked him the most?). A favorite line, again context-free: "She said: I want a tattoo. / She said, I want a thigh wound." Or the image of the city full of "instructible sparks." Or the title of this post, taken from a poem of his.
I would have bought his book, but the bourbon took up my free cash. I won't make that mistake again.
6/6/06
Readings
The 11th Street Bar was as packed as a herring barrel. The reading started on time, every reader stuck to the time limits, and no fakery was evident. Miraculously, everyone read work that was worth hearing. Hopler was vigorously lyrical, not as bawdy as he represents. Siken was knotty, associational. Strekfus was mythopoetic. Glück prophesied.
Afterwards, tipsy from a beer on an empty stomach, I walked and talked with a friend. At dinner, I read a poem to him. With generosity, good will, and enlightenment, this friend then ripped the guts out of the poem, splayed them out in front of me, and explained their pathology. Such criticism beats any praise.
On the bus home afterwards, I started some new poems. I didn't say they're good, but they're different.
The 11th Street Bar was as packed as a herring barrel. The reading started on time, every reader stuck to the time limits, and no fakery was evident. Miraculously, everyone read work that was worth hearing. Hopler was vigorously lyrical, not as bawdy as he represents. Siken was knotty, associational. Strekfus was mythopoetic. Glück prophesied.
Afterwards, tipsy from a beer on an empty stomach, I walked and talked with a friend. At dinner, I read a poem to him. With generosity, good will, and enlightenment, this friend then ripped the guts out of the poem, splayed them out in front of me, and explained their pathology. Such criticism beats any praise.
On the bus home afterwards, I started some new poems. I didn't say they're good, but they're different.
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