I’ve gone to 7 reading, 4 poetry workshops, plus a haiku conference in the last 3 weeks. Less than I intended to and pencilled in to go to, but more than I could have.
People keep commenting on how I go to a lot of things. Greg Betts did a double-take at seeing me at his reading a year or two ago, remarking at how I’m at everything.
I don’t always put readings in my calendar nor take pictures, but as near as I can reconstruct, er, looks like I’d have to agree with the general idea.
I’ve seen about 70 feature readers and about 60 more at open mic this calendar year. That’s about 1 poet in person a day on average. (That’s the same accuracy of average that has all these families with 0.5 of a kid to take on vacations.)
But that *is* a lot of activity, isn’t it. That’s including writers festival, and only counting only the poets. That’s not including reading online, magazines, books, workshop round tables, online workshops circles and email poem exchange.
On the other hand, it takes the place of music and TV. How much of the time do other people who don’t go to as much have music on rotation, or watch or rewatch movies?
I’m not even sure when I started going to as many readings. I was going to readings in the early 90s and workshopping in the 80s but I guess I kicked into overdrive thanks to Bywords in 2004 when I got in the John Newlove tribute chapbook and had to go to this thing called “Writers Fest” which was happening on my doorstep and I didn’t know about it.
So, am I getting my time’s worth from all these readings?
Poetry readings can go either way. They are a crap shoot.
Why? Could be how that third consciousness of the personality of the group in the room that rises. Could be the reader being totally on, or having an off night, or material happening to resonate with what’s been going on in listener’s life. Depending on what I have hooks to catch with.
So many random factors.
I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.
Sometimes my wavelength may get a better noise-signal ratio from the page than most conversation. Or the reverse.
I go whether I know the poet or not because if I only go to what I heard of I’m just giving myself the same information on closed loop. I want to discover new ideas.
Okay reading are about half the time. I am no worse off for exposing myself to the words and the social. Not transformative but ok. There are a few phrases or a fragment of an idea that are pleasing. I get an orientation to some people. Tidbits of what people are doing.
Good reading nourish and leave me a notch higher in energy and well-being than before. It is pleasant or interesting and engaging with a mix of waiting for something salient to come. Might be flat or sour notes but I am glad I dragged myself out of home. That might be third of the time.
Negative memories are easier to pull. Readings can leave me fidgety, crabby, bedraggled, drained, put upon, or shut out with nothing to click with, internalizing the palpable anxiety or anger or grief of the presenter, bored or risk of sputtering about quitting this form of recreation. It’s a minority of the time but an evening-long shadow.
That’s probably (to continue a bit of pataphysics-measuring here) a fifth of readings. Those are definitely a notch or few downwards. Sometimes the social afterwards can bring back up to where I was before or a notch or few higher.
Excellent readings remind me why I go and why life is good. The poetry, ideas, language and presentation leave me high and energized for a day or few afterwards. I feel supremely satisfied during. Any associated social is just bonus. They humble me. I would happily apprentice to the mastery of skill. Those might happen once or twice a year.
The Tree Reading of Expeditions of a Chimaera (Bookthug) by Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Moure in October was one case of excellence.
Monty Reid reading at the AB Series this February was one.
Barry Dempster‘s reading at the Plan 99 last week was the most recent case of I-could-die-happy-now sort of reading.
As much as its good to say something turned my crank, I’m always hesitant to say what I could feel because of the potential for reverse reading. There’s an implication of competition, of win-lose for the other 98%.
It’s like at a writers festival when there were two novelists on panel. I could see the book table was being watched afterwards by one of the novelists who was trying to casually observe. I felt distinctly conspicuous and penitent buying the book of the other author.
No one wants to not be the top pick. Maybe that’s just the backsliding Baptist in me piping up. The cost of any pleasure must be paid in guilt and unnecessary apology.

This isn’t my post for the day (or might be) but what Amy King at the Huffington Post puts an interesting spin on this subject of clarity and transparency of meaning versus seeing where it goes and how:

I’m often told that I have an occasional beautiful line or image but my poetry sometimes doesn’t “make sense.” I’m told to “move on” from poetry and write a memoir because I relay great anecdotes.
These encouragements are grounded in the notion that reading should please rather than challenging what people know, thus asking them to step beyond that comfort zone. For them, there is a progress from poetry to memoir that is, in fact, a move towards ease and comfort, rather than opening up and exploring what else our minds are able to conceptualize.
It’s the equivalent of my students asking me, “Why do we have to analyze these texts? Why can’t we just enjoy them?” As though analysis disallows pleasure–try telling the teenager who is suddenly fascinated by cars not to analyze why he likes them, what goes on under the hood, or which tires work best on what surfaces; tell him instead to just to sit back and enjoy how graceful the cars are as they speed by.

Those curious about text, what it can do, how it does it, will always be around as well as those who could care less and can’t be enticed to care more based on who they are at this time.
We can use poetry to tell entertaining stories. We can strip device out of the personal lyric, or load it up. But to say, push it over to fit memoir, then along the dynamic to some other range, a dramatic story arc, tweak to hero’s journey…now make it ironic and satirical and then strip it back and then extending it out and then…and then. Ideas are fluid and can fit various containers of various sizes. Explicit coherency isn’t the only mark to hit. To not hit that is not leaving the binary pole of b.s. Ideas, shuffling, exploring. If you’re reaching deep, you’re into the forest instead of at the front tree’s bark. Sometimes the forest is razed. Sometimes grazed. Sometimes the wood bore. Sometimes the bore hole in the wood.
But mental habits serve us well. We get used to divvying. Do whatever genre-bender you want, but what’s the sale’s line? Prose, poetry, memoir. What’s an entry handle? a niche specialization for the handshake of how to take what follows? How to frame if it fits? Is it serious or satire? From the heart or from the art?
Maybe it’s a product of urbanness where refining into specialities is prestige and not stepping on any toes, creating a market. To be a generalist and cross the tools of rules for how to do a genre, mix and match affects and effects is counter-tide somehow?
But to have someone say, I hear what you’re saying but do it my way instead, it’s a way of not being heard. It’s sort of like someone futzing over your clothes, correcting your collar, giving hair advice, recommending a diet, more protein, less whatever. People saying, just tell me more of those ___ to nth degree, and forget the rest.
When the audience is trying to mandate what they want said and how, it’s time for them to write or say their own story. A thing is what it is. You know what I mean?
Her distinction of pleasure and analysis being in opposition (emphasis of italics mine) is a good point. They can be obstacles but they can complement.
Just ask the person who loves cars to not learn, not tinker. No questions. No answers. Stay outside, on the surface, from a distance. Now love. Does seem unnatural, doesn’t it.
—
As soon as one understands what someone says, there’s a sort of recognition of self and wanting to make the other more like self. It’s faster than conscious thought. As soon as you make a connection you want to press in a direction. As Waldrop said, “inference is a transition toward assertion”
That’d be in

it’s a tall order that expects pain to crystalize into beauty
and we must close our eyes to conceive of heaven
the inside of the lid is fertile in images unprovoked by experience
or perhaps its pressure on the eyeball equals prayer
in the same way that inference is a transition toward assertion
even of serving rights of dawn against
a darkened and empty background ~ Rosemary Waldrop

from PENN sound from Nov 9, 2009 of Lawn of Excluded Middle (from Curves to the Apple)
—
Entertaining, Engaging Accessible Poetry is a tricky thing. In a way it is giving something new in a form that is pleasurable. It is giving an audience what they like, how they like it even if they don’t know they will as they’ve never seen it before as it hasn’t existed before exactly like that.
This is, in a way this, bringing people together as a room can respond collectively the same way. It is a reproducible kind of connect. In another way it is pushing distance between people. It is keeping audience at arm length as a kind of parlour chatter of a really good storyteller. It is pulling audience towards the speaker with clever hook, and pretty hooks and engaging spins and ooh tah-dah finish. That’s a hard skill to get to without seeming to be a huckster fumbling to the obvious bottom line.
There’s a hiding in polish socially. Which is not to say don’t hide. Hiding can be healthy and welcome. It’s part of the spectrum. Insisting on constant exposure is as unnatural as never leaving oneself vulnerable.
Being the Entertaining One that never troubles the mind isn’t an even reciprocal relationship. A nice idea and pleasant experience can become some self-perpetuating state. It could be symbiotic or parasitic. Good time friends readers may have no interest in the ideas, or the person, or the stories really, just themselves and their pleasure. Change the mix and it’s like Ronnie Milsap’s Nobody Likes Sad Songs. Except with poetry, it may be Nobody Likes Happy Songs. or Nobody Like Intellectual Songs.
Although it doesn’t take a genius to make the same choices, what Jason Hartley said about the bind of advanced geniuses applies,

the basis of it is these advanced geniuses are always challenging their fans, because they’re really listening to themselves. They’re doing what they want to do; eventually that turns everybody off on them. […] They know that people are going to be mad about it, they just don’t care. They’re not doing it to make people mad, they’re doing it to make themselves happy.

[via Quill & Quire]
To write poetry that challenges can be seen as just unnecessarily testing the reader or “being difficult”. A motivation to vex the reader is drawn but as friend recently said, “The speaker’s life is not about the listener’s life.”
The reader may just want the writer to get back to the audience when all the sorting things out is done and there’s a tidy little story ready for consumption.
Is that the reader one wants to please? Depends. Does that reader buy books? Does that writer rely books to barter thru cash for survival food?
If you have the luxury of a way to make ends meet. If you are self-sufficient for sounding boards and for social and for ego assurance and for whatever, the audience is not relevant to accommodate. The process is the end. The product is to be fed back into the process while the main act is living, learning, exploring. The books or poems or songs or what have you look like end product because they are performed or for sale but they are just snapshots of stage. They look like finished product. You can buy or not but that doesn’t essentially matter.
If you want to use these bits and feed them into your own process, that’s more interesting because then you are in the same game of processing and poking around. Thus perhaps the origin of trading around of chapbooks and admitting it’s a deficit not profit game for finances because the framework is not an economic one but an ideas one.

Ok, I said I was taking the weekend off. But since I’m reading it any and putting things on FB anyway I may as well put here too.
I went lookinfor the Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert shortlists. Further in Stephen Rowe’s archives is this contemplation of what does “great poem” mean, in which he said,

Great poems communicate ideas of terrible significance, things we hadn’t noticed before (but wish we had), but also things we wish we may not have known. There is, above all, an honesty in such discourse, something that strikes us as true; not only true, but something able to change our understanding of the nature of truth.

Some great interviews by Jessica Ruano: Ottawa Tonight with Capital Poetry Collective who will be doing a few shows with the Fringe Festival (17th to 26th of the month)
June 19/20: “Attack of the Dreadlocks” John Akpata and Prufrock, 21/22: “The Copper Conundrum” Danielle K. L. Grégoire, Rusty Priske, and Kevin Matthews, 23rd: BWANAGEEK – The Life and Work of Steve Motherf@*!ing Sauve (A Rambling Nerd Epic), 24 and 25th : “The Adorkables” Nadine Thornhill, Jessica Ruano, Faye Estrella, Thomas McKinlay. June 26 : OPEN POETRY SHOW: mixed bag of spoken word artists.
Alessandro Porco talks about Steve Venright. If you haven’t read Steve Venright, at least sample this.
Heine Sight is a group project on playing with a poem by 1800s Heine to see what each poet would do with it.
This is old news but it’s new to me. Poetry Out Loud in the U.S. How wonderful is this. 325,000 American students participating in a poetry recitation competition. [via Farfalla Press]
It’s in its 3rd year. Winners at every level get prizes to be applied against more poetry books. We, culturally, memorize songs and jingles, and yet briskly skim poems. Or buy them. But recitation on the scale gives a cultural currency.
This year’s winner was interviewed at the Poetry Foundation and Amber Rose Johnston said

Competing in Poetry Out Loud has completely changed my perspective on written and classical poetry. For example, since Shakespeare was the author of one of my competition poems, it forced me to really analyze his style of writing and the message he wished to portray to his audience. During this process, I came to find out what a funny, and romantic writer Shakespeare really was! I no longer disregard poems because of how long ago they were written, or because the language isn’t easy to understand at first glance. In fact, because of Poetry Out Loud I truly seek the beauty in every poem, and the meaning in each line.

Poems they list range from Shakespeare to Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Donne to Lorna Dee Cervantes, Charles Bernstein to Emily Jane Brontë, Margaret Atwood to Longfellow. This goes hand in hand with the publishers of poetry promotion who did Spoken Word Revolution and The Poem I Turn to. It seems a furthering of the process of getting poems in front of people’s eyes.
It’s been a good time for getting poetry that I can hear lately. 8 new poetry books have come to live with me in the last 2 weeks. 6 this week alone. (And, 5 others in the previous 2 weeks.)
It’s been a droughtful time for a while and then the turnaround. I had 4 consecutive days where I encountered a poem or poems that made me feel a yes, yes, yes in the gut. From page, from stage, from digital screen. I hope to elaborate on some of that.
But not today. It’s my day off.

Clever postman doesn’t ring even once, just uses 3 elastic bands and hangs it from the handle. No delivery notice and running about after delivery trucks and it being on trucks when I check the post office.

Books in the mail. What’s better?
Contents, usually. More to come. Always more to come.
btw, the previously mentioned performance by Amal, Rusty has some scoop on.
And think I’ll take this weekend off pesbo. See you flip side.

AB Series hosts Richard Truhlar this evening at the Mercury Lounge.
Truhlar (“poet / fictioneer / text-sound composer /”pataphysicist / concretist / visual artist”) has been publishing poetry since the 70s.
Along with other avant-garde writers, he was responsible for such publishing imprints as Kontakte, Phenomenon Press, Teksteditions and Underwhich Editions. He has done sound poetry, electronic music, boardsides, chapbooks and anthologies, experimental fiction and poetry.
He has had several books of his literary works published by Mercury Press, including The Hollow and other fictions, A Porcelain Cup Placed There, Utensile Paradise, Figures in Paper Time, Parisian Novels, The Pitch, Dynamite in the Lung. He and Beverly Daurio edited an anthology of short stories The Closets of Time in 2007. As a performer, he was a member of the progressive new wave band Warm Jets, of the sound poetry quartet Owen Sound, and of the electroacoustic chamber ensemble Tekst.
If you haven’t already you can read more at the 12 or 20 questions on him.
Coming up this fall is season 4, opening with icons Nobuo Kubota and Penn Kemp. There seemed to be a universally wowed audience last time Penn Kemp was in town with a great fun show. (And I missed it. Second chances come.)