Poets Live

Rufo hosting on Sept 20 at the Poets Live Series held in the wine cellar space of Carr’s Irish Pub, 1 Rue du Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries, Paris.

Peter Hughes also read a sonnet sequence of love poems for his wife. They are as of yet unpublished but tight and moving. He also read epistle poems which are a dialogue with an Italian poet. The series starts out as as 54-line exchange, then 53-line then down to 1-line exchange. It will be coming out shortly as a book. (What an interesting mind.)

Peter Hughes’ Behoven from Oystercatcher Press. The title is a play from Beethoven as all the poems were composed listening to 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in order. I’ll have to seek out those in particular. His plays among language have an energizing music to them. Recently having heard Beethoven pieces performed on piano, I was struck by how he seemed curmudgeonly and comic, aware of being dramatic and almost spoofing himself. But what do I know of music of Beethoven, only this impression against Chopin’s pieces who seemed more self-serious, earnestly manic when his music was irregular.
The poetry seems matching of confirming to the fragments I felt – there’s this comic twist and large gestures both in music responding to it. For example to Piano Sonata 5,

from sonata 5
        ideas cancel each other out
    gravity & hiccoughs
        mimes of paranoia
twitching through the forest of itself
            poised & well-hung
          the magic cherries
         turn out to be
       peaches

from sonata 21

they joined hands
       to form a lake
   in which nothing could live

There’s a sort of twist and grim more than dark humour and yet the pivots are so lively without falling to random.

Bonny Finberg, a travelling poet between continents, was a pretty animate reader thus no photo was left unblurred. She was launching Déja Vu.
Both of our poems sets had bird flights and amoeba sort of references and neither being at all nature poems. That was an interesting cross-tie. Bonny plays in fragments well. Hers isn’t a pendantic story-telling. Even with her poem, “A Novel in 24 Chapters” with one line per chapter, there are gaps, space enough to breathe in. For example,

9.
Early attempts at fondue failed because cheese had not yet been invented.
10.
She forgot where she put her untold stories so she went to the market for a new economy.
11.
Ethnic minorities took pictures everywhere.
12.
So close to death his wife gave birth before the cricket tournament.

There’s such a wonderful density of compression, humour, cynicism and pathos. Each could unpack rather than each idea set out in labelled indexed diagram. There’s a vivacious bite to some of her poems like

Falling
Smoking star,
listen to me.
Call the stain
to you hand.
Go – I’m ready
to burn.
Has caffeine
a tiger’s kiss?
Be wild,
shove the
sequestered
kiss with force
and school me
in your pause.
Ia this
blood
clean as
the sea?
Make me wait.
Respect the
sea and
say amen.

“School me in your pause”. What a lovely turn of phrase. Some poets use imperative but in a wishy-washy way that seems more of a rhetorical suggestion. This instead has such a lovely force to it.
To me it seems to order a lover to come during a period, challenging the religious laws that forbid sex during periods, slashes back at the indoctrination of the notion as woman as unclean. The woman is salt water ocean, a force of nature and thank her for it.

My new chapbook in rack with George Vance’s Short Circuit which play in concrete poetry and self-disruptive sort of texts.

That’d be me reading in the vaulted space. Good acoustics.

Poets Live from Pearl Pirie on Vimeo.

Rufu said there are 3 poets tonight and each are launching chapbooks and each of you in the audience are buying a chapbook so that’s a nice symmetry isn’t it? (Heh. The nudge might have worked too.)
David Barnes did a post on the Sept 19th Spoken Word in Paris. See his post with a few of my photos in it here.