It’s sweet to be invited to read and to read with people you like. What a wonderful room of people came to the launch. It reminds me why I’d ever shared any writing.
Warm welcomes, familiar faces, encouraging strangers, and that sub-vocal track of people being with you, hums, changed breathing, chuckles. There’s a sense of connection that you aren’t the only person on your own wavelength, that maybe you can communicate after all. There isn’t a resistance wall. There’s no despair or anger or lash only people wanting to latch onto the words shared by each poet. It suggests humanity could kind of work, a well-being in harmony like a unisong choir.
It’s such a pleasure to hear poems that were workshopped, nascent come into themselves as finished and to see poets over the years grow in skill and confidence. I workshopped with Laurie over a decade ago and with Lana over the last few years. There’s an increased precision and emotional reach in their poems. Beautiful to se develop.
It’s comforting to read when a quarter of the faces are familiar and you know they’re in your corner. It’s a little reunion. It lowers the stakes. After all when poetry is done, there’s no immediate fix so you might as well go with and present what is now.
I sometimes am anxious for days before a reading, sometimes not until after than jitter for days. Right before I go on, there’s nerves, but once I’m at the front, I’m centred in an uncommon way for me, alert, aware, clear and can improv in comfort.
The night sold out the copies of chapbooks but Pinhole is reprinting so you can still get copies.
It was a great turnout for poetry, at nearly 40 people.
I wonder, what if special events make for a better audience? Maybe I globalize from an instance of alchemy. But…
A one-off event is singular. People come for the readers in particular. They aren’t just bar patrons who didn’t clear out from the dim crusty room. They aren’t indifferent curious people wandering through the public space. They aren’t someone who pencil in a date to socialize, readers incidental. Is it something about a prevalently female space where there aren’t microaggressions to deflect? Or a male host who resonates more with his “side”. Is it both what is present and what is absent?
Who is present and how they build on one another. People give up hours, set aside time and energy, rearrange their habits and come out to enjoy and support and empathize and be moved. The people are more central than the stuff around. The strangers who take that moment to say I liked x in particular. Those seconds give months of energies.
In a reading series, core audience knows that the buns-in-seat-count ensure continued funding thus creates a way to pay readers, but it means a certain percentage show up not even knowing who presents. A series may have a certain thrust of aesthetic, like a magazine or book publisher does. It’s a different animal, perhaps. Although in a reading series with a large admittance fee, maybe there is a keenness and desire to see that thing that matters in particular. In any case people are displacing something for the occasion. There’s a cost that the readers have to offset by sharing what they find the audience will gain value from. That’s a responsibility, in this sharing, this caring.
The act of public sharing of writing is a sort of gift economy of exchange. By being present you gift, whether speaking or listening.