Susan McMaster was the first poet to launch the new section of the Tree reading series where 10 minutes goes to someone to do a mini-craft talk. She did a poetic overview, a retrospective of her voice and focus as it developed and changes. She said that as she goes on her sense of poetics gets briefer and simpler. It has always been truth-oriented. She gave examples with each phase.
She characterized her earlier work as a tangled venting, self-absorbed and harder to enter. She still values it because it speaks to some people who are a comparable place. At a later phase she moved to expressions that aimed to be accessible with a language that would admit as many as who would be willing to enter. The wider world entered the content of the poem. The most recent works try to engage with those necessary, difficult things. Subjects connect her life to other lives to sort out sense of truths.
Joe Blades was the feature reader at Tree. On March 10th he read from some older material as well as current writings from his newest of 30 books and chapbooks to see print, from The Book that Doesn’t Close. The Serbian translation of his book title caused a eureka and an upcoming spinoff poem series on prisons.
From older works was a poem called I am Tree, in light of the name of the series about pollution and the state of trees that can’t move, just stay themselves, solid, self-assured, and state of labels. We call carbon dioxide poison because we expel it but for trees, it is life. If humans get cancer from sun and can’t adapt to less Oxygen, maybe we should live underground and learn to breathe what most of the air is. Interesting spins.
from the Book That Doesn’t Close is a dual text in the sense that one text runs along the top of the page and cullings from notebooks run under that ribbon of text, sometimes chiming, sometimes jangling. It’s something of a meta book of poetry, journaling life as a poet, a poet thinking about poetry, poems, critics and other poets. For examples, nothing exists entirely alone; everything relates to poetry “must not be deluded into thinking poetry is their true mind” or critic tears off arm of writer. immediately replaced by another critic with arm of a corpse. [Italics rather than quotes where I may have mistranscribed and have no line breaks]
Interesting to see how page converts to air. I’ve seen notations for privacy of Mr. R________ and not knowing how that would be put to voice. Joe Blades did the long underscore with a pinch of finger drawn arms length in sudden silence from phrase so anyone listening without eyes would have to look up and see the text’s analogous gesture.
Interesting mention that while in Serbia Blades found out that the practice for poetry reading is not so passive as here. One reads for 5 minutes and discussion runs for 50 after. People then can dialogue about the subjects interactionally as the norm. Nice, that.
Tree’s new format with time-limits of 4 minutes per open mic and a limited set of 4 or 5 readers and more but shorter breaks gives a more digestible flow to the evening. Not everyone can digest 1 or 3 hours of poetry at a sitting and now when your brain fills, you don’t have to go to your happy place and stay seated, nor disrupt to leave early.