Aug 23 at the Ottawa Art gallery housed the the Factory reading. It was the 14th anniversary of above/ground press and the launch of 3 new chapbooks. [You can buy at that link, and try some of Hawkins’ here and hear some of Earl’s here]. It’s always nice to take home what you just heard in the print version.
Hawkins, Earl and McCann each drew a retinue of fans, with some overlap. Somewhere over 40 people came out for the reading by organizer rob mclennan.
William Hawkins put out a best-of collection of poems before some of us were born. One lady who bought his chapbook said she remembers him from the 1960s, standing on Sparks Streets hawking copies of a socio-political magazine called Octopus. He read poems of loss and aging with some humor that made some laughter thru the group including Birthday Poem.
His poems also ran thru the touching range. Can I have this dance?, which culminates in second half of a long relationship with,
Do you love me?
(I can barely move)
Do you love me?
(Now I’ve lost my groove)
Do you love me?
(Now that I can’t dance)
It was mentioned that when he had a reading at the National Library he drew one of the largest crowds of recent times.
Isn’t it oddly sub-verbal when poetry resonates and builds power over and under words as much as thru them? The very sense of being powerless against the oratory, understood consciously or not is what sets strong poetry that fits apart.
At any rate when Hawkins left stage, his poetry got a strong applause and some more signings of his chapbook.
There’s little way to predict what works. Sometimes performance changes the page. My clinician mind wants to put a slip cover over the side of specimen and micro scope it to atomic explanations.
Why, by what word, meaning, mechanism do I get moved to tears again by Earl’s Eleanor poem series? I tend to be fairly nonporous. Movies or songs can only move me once in the tender range. But Eleanor poems welled me up again. It bypasses my consciousness with power like dreams or like a rhythm of road around nodes like these.
mosques are white bleached by sand ive let walls conquer my body
theres one drop of water on the lip of the cinnabar pitcher and i want it
and later
yesterday fused glass shatters
leafy canvas of rain finally
and somehow I tip feeling something I have no words for. Rather like Meaghan Haughian’s paintings. I don’t know what’s being accessed. It’s a subtle access.
With Marcus McCann’s poems I have more of a sense of why. I can feel the rompiness, feel my sense of tension of expectation, the shift away, feel the energy of performance. I can look at the title and say, the portmanteau of Heterosexual and Skeptical and the breakdown of the word into eros kept just zings in so many directions. I can read lines like
That buddy was a husky punk, so much skin –
buddy, that badunkadunk tongue was a thrum sucker
and I can hear the titter of laughter at the sound plays and see how the constraints to vowels that Christian Bok got so much attention for in eunoia and the music click of coming from Twista or the Trace Adkins’ badonkadonk hit mashed in there.
I can look at any given poem and see the sense of humor and know something consciously about what’s going on. I can get lost, hear the poems, lose sight of the poet, similar to Eleanor poems. Similarly as well, I can hear the same poem more than once and get more each time instead of fading out in attention. They are rich in depth.
He read from his launching chapbook and the second print run of Basement Tapes, made with Nicholas Lea and Andrew Faulkner. I was glad to get one of those chapbooks this time around. The way sounds pile on each other such as in Hydrosonics, Part S made from taking all the S words out of another piece and restringing the beads to new beats and juxtopositions made some lines like these:
Somerset, self-sour sinners scatter Satruday
[…]Some smoothing snowplouh, shrug-shouldered, shaming sediment
It was a contented crowd that drifted out to socialize off, or sleep off, the poetry buzz.
