So it is with poetry. Some days, you think you suck, other days, you confirm your genius. This being a suck day, I attempted to enliven the mood with a trip to the Segue reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. On tap today, Arron Kunin and Jen Hofer. I must admit that I'm probably the worst person on earth to review a reading, as I find it really, really hard to pay attention to them. Many times a reading fills me with a sort of zen; hearing the words makes you receptive to what's going on in your own head, like in a Quaker meeting, and I end up paying far more attention to that than what's going on on stage.
Still, here goes. Aaron Kunin went first. He had a cute personality, it seemed to me. He would start telling you something about the work, and then this sort of look came on his face as though he were thinking, "You know, hearing this out loud, I sound like I'm completely insane," and then he'd try to explain more but he was just digging the hole deeper. And he's a Big!Hair poet. I am sometimes jealous of the Big!Hair poets; their hair makes them look more impressive, much in the same way that a frilled lizard's frill makes it more impressive. My hair is sadly limp; I will frighten away no predators and awe no audiences with it.
Anyway, Kunin is working on a series of poems about shame, in pursuit of a "value-neutral Paradise lost." I was interested in them, because I'm working on poems about guilt, although not value-neutral guilt. Guilt is like shame's estranged twin. They don't necessarily come in a pair. He read forcefully, shooting out words like a nail gun. He ENUNCIATED. The poems were interesting; I liked "Five Security Zones," which was based on the medieval blason, a type of poem that divided everything into body parts...you know -- "there is a garden in my mistress' face," -- except Kunin wrote about shame, not love. Although, again, value-neutral shame -- kind of an S/M thing, as he put it, not an "Ahhh, the vengeance of God!" thing.
He also read a selection from an upcoming novel, The Mandarin, which he said was about how everyone who reads his novels falls asleep and never wakes up. In introducing the selection, he talked about the sexual nature of umbrellas, which was kind of where the "Oh, my god, I sound insane" thing came in. It was funny, though. Good stuff all around.
Twenty minute break and on came Jen Hofer, who had weird little puff buns atop her head, which, given the lighting, cast triplicate shadows that resembled diminished Mickey Mouses behind her. She read from Lawless, which reminded me, for some reason, of piano lessons. You know...breaking something down into its component parts, never jumping on to the part ahead, until you've done the part before. That always depressed me about piano lessons. Or math problems. Damned place values. Anyhoo, the poem was about how a record of something only records that object's past, and tells you nothing of its future. After the poem was read once, it was repeated, with associative interpolations between each line. After that, she went on to some new work, political, about the Iraq War, etc, I think, which relied a lot on wordplay...sound repetitions, like this:
prowess, in training, a prowl.
Much alliteration, some off-rhyme. Very rich, sound-wise, but it went on for a while, and I think people were getting bored. At least, the guy in front of me totally fell asleep and the girls to my right were passing notes and giggling at them. I spent a good deal of time thinking about how this woman sitting in the back looked really really familiar, and then realized she looked exactly like the woman who played Mark Green's wife on ER.
I guess we're all too MTV. We're easily distracted, bored. Sometimes this is good; like I said above, listening to someone else read can relax you into being able to hear what your own muse is saying, but I felt a sort of palpable desire in the crowd, a silent question forming, something like this:
"Could you please read a short, funny one about a duck now? We're very tired. We like ducks."
Here's this poor woman, being all heartfelt and forceful on violence and justice, and I think the audience would really like to have seen a juggler or a magic act instead. Maybe there should be poetry vaudeville. One of the perils of reading, I guess. I think short poems, or narrative poems, lend themselves best to readings, because they don't go on so long that the listener loses the thread or gets bored by the whole thing, or because they're narrative, they fit the schematic that our brain already knows how to pay attention to. Story-time! Everyone likes storytime, because after stories come snack. And recess.
I have to say though that I admire the readers just for reading. It's been a long time since I did a reading, and from what I remember, they always tripped my "fight or flight" response. Except that I don't have a "fight or flight" response, I have a "throw up or faint" response. I never did either, actually, but I often wondered if people thought I was really "intense" on stage, when whatever intensity I projected was coming from my internal monologue: "Do not barf. Do not barf. Do not barf."
So, to all readers everywhere, way to go for not tossing those cookies, or ending up unconscious! You're a better man than I, Gunga Din!
Some Aaron Kunin poems.
Some Jen Hofer poems.
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