Recently there was the reading by Brick Books. It was a fun night. Kitty kept things lively with her pop-quiz-style constraints, a sort of point at you, you and you next: read for 5 minutes, and now, speed round, pick a 2 minute selection. Reid, O’Meara and Mcinnis didn’t know when they’d be up or for how long. It felt more communal and interactive as an effect. An interesting sort of constraint where poets are in the awkward position of needing to know how long any given poem will take and egad, a time limit that means usual reading poems don’t fit. Not a now I do my thing for 10 minutes and I’m done. There was a lot of laughter thru. A gamut of good poems. Some new, some out of new manuscripts, some out of books. And the night was capped off with the Call Me Katie quieting-soul-beast music.
I didn’t take photos but John W caught Kitty at the door prize moment and Charles shows her with the Brick books table. Charles got a picture of Peter Midgley who was one of the features the next night at the above/ground reading.
Monday night, Midgley did poems with a mixture of languages in his dramatic poems. he included a cultural form called Praise Songs, which he prefaced by saying are actually not songs, nor are they praise. They are a speaker’s corner sort of call out of political criticism like the original Persian ghazal was. A vivid sort of speech. A cross-pollination of different spheres of cultures and intersections of is always refreshing.
Ken Belford and his newest book lan(d)guage
It also contained poetry that wasn’t contained in that de facto mandate that seems to exist where one talks of myths or personal history. It used the head and politics but wasn’t cerebral nor straining to persuade. Nicely balanced. One poem of his was of pathogens, how we swap them with money by trading animals, how pathogens pass invisibly at the river mud, may lie in obscurity and have no impact on humans or have huge impacts. One poem spoke to how economic systems of market forces impact the social. Lovely to see poetry with cognition involved and control of metaphor.
Clint Burnham with jw before the reading.
Burnham‘s poems were interesting. One poem was, on the page, like a vocabulary list which read continually coupled and recoupled meaning from set phrases so the narrative kept breaking and reforming. (Example eludes me just now.)
It was tiring to hear because it requires continual listening unlike some lyric narrative poetry that’s “baggy”, where you can blah blah fill in the expected for a line or stanza at the time and it goes directly where one might expect from the opening. In contrast his density reminded me of Crabwise to the Hounds.
We do tend to be a recording-oriented sort of town. Here, the Michele Denise Smith is being audio-captured as she read. I’m afraid being first, each thing that came successively displaced it. I’m trying not to take notes but rely on memory. This has repercussions occasionally.
Gregory Betts pitched hit on Monday since Christine Stewart had to cancel. (No wardrobe was forwarded, so he dressed as himself.)
He read from 2 poems, one of which was political and yet what I liked better was his erasure version of Shakespeare’s sonnet 51. From it he plundered words to make 51 sub-poems from it, each poem using the words in the original order. Interesting challenge and constraint. (I’m rather fond of constraints it seems.)
This selective erasure and slicing has a long tradition, sampling to make a new text. Saw this recombining elements to make a new narrative in a Canadian Bible Society tract at my feet in a parking garage. “I am familiar with all your ways…even the very hairs on your head are numbered… for you were made in my image …and in me you live and move and have your being.” (That would be Psalms, Matthew, Genesis, Acts across centuries slid togehter as one voice and thought.)
[Cross-posted]