Poets signing their books at the OIWF — Suzanne Buffam with The Irrationalist, Steven Heighton with Patient Frame and Michael Lista with Bloom.
There was laughter during Buffam’s reading, in the intro, and in the body of poems. She introduced herself by relating that one reader condescended to say that it wasn’t as enjoyable as her last book. I didn’t read her last one, but The Irrationalist seemed good, particularly the short clippings that were playful. She described them as possibly the only time she’d had fun writing poetry. One small sample: on geological time: enjoy the view while you can, Mount Everest.
The short poems were her scraps that closed themselves down but she eventually realized, they were short but self-contained and sufficient in themselves. She also read longer poems with an occasional meditative frame that was touched with the surreal such as one about experiences, which have taught that nothing is worth doing for experience alone, as they turn into small piles of smoking ash. The smoke rises again later in the same poem from the blue light of tv. Another line that struck me: “If it is desire I lack, I can sit, wait for my lack to dissolve.”
There’s a certain tyranny to excellence so that Steven Heighton when doing a great reading of solid excellent poems is pleasing but isn’t surprising. One poem reminded me of Chiasson’s Beattitudes. All the people who by living as they do in their small worlds saving the whole world. Beautiful litany of attentiveness and praise. A section of just over a dozen poems try to parse what to make of the human monsters in our society, such as ones locked inside hatred. Hard subjects that the heart tries to process and encapsulate in words so they remain vivid and accurate but blunted to prick the soul less rawly. Another section is of translations of poems. Another few are love poems including one to his daughter.
In interview on stage he spoke of how
if you write of what interests you, you will bore your reader. It must be your obsession because there’s an energy loss in the transmission to page and another in page to reader. You must write from your passion for enough of your original energy to make it through.
Several people remarked afterward — just who is this Michael Lista? Some have literally heard him thanks to Seen Reading recordings. His book is meticulously conceived and executed. The links cover some of the — how it takes Ulysses as a superstructure of it happened one day, and the contemporary story of a man in the 40s working on the Manhattan Project when he erred and it went critical. He died, while his assistant, who was having an affair with his wife, didn’t.
How the plot is expressed is across poems, each done in the spirit and effect of a different particular poet from Seamus Heaney to Alice Oswald, James Joyce to the Velvet Underground. He calls it English to English translation in that he mirrors another original poem by emulating style, and rhythm down to the level of syllable per syllable and line break matching as well as how the pacing of mood flows. What an interesting set of constraints to do simultaneously. “Your mind opens like a drawerful of forks”, “the opacity we wore as marriage masks” and “pull your genius over you like an overcoat” are sample phrases that stood out in the live performance.
Presumably as I read I’ll share more…and after a bit I intend to go back to more of the poetry at fest. It ain’t over until long after it’s over…
P.S. gestures of home of John W. MacDonald’s look at the 4 novelists as they spoke in The Writing Life.