Went to BPC on Saturday and heard Sherry Brennan and Tim Davis. Sherry's reading was interesting...her tone when she read was a little odd; she sped up and slowed down as if to show emotions that the words weren't really generating and tended to end each sentence or line on a slight upturn as if asking a question or purposefully working against any denotative heft in her sentences.
Two of her poems met a round of applause. One involved her taking a poem she had written, tearing it up, and then reading from the fragments. It was interesting, but I think it was also a suggested exercise from Charles Bernstein and Bernadette Mayers' language poetry exercise compendium from back in the 70s, so I would think people would be getting tired of it. It does, though, give you the archaeological feeling of working on a partial and fragmented text, and as the poem was in part about Sappho, at least hearkened back to the fact that that poet's work exists only now in fragments.
The other well-met poem was a long one involving only the words (and letters) in the phrase, "The sky again today is blue." She repeated each word, sang it, broke it into morphemic elements, repeated those...the effect was not unlike Velimir Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laughing," although not quite as funny. (It's actually impossible to red the Incantation without breaking into laughter). It was kind of interesting to hear someone read such a poem, but when I thought about how like it was to Khlebnikov's, I thought, "People have been doing this for a hundred years!"
The other reader was Tim Davis, filling in for Fiona Templeton. He launched into a long, seemingly interminable poem that I couldn't really tell what it was. A cento? A series of mistrung anecdotes with some language poetry-esque disconnects and non-sequiturs? Nothing in the poem hearkened back to anything else in the poem, which actually made it really, really boring. If you're going to go on that long, something has to click, some thread has to gather, or the reader or listener simply isn't repaid for the effort of going through it all. Individual sentences or juxtapositions of sentences were funny, but you soon forgot them in the ongoing stream of jabber.
Dreamt last night that our new cat, Cappuccino, was reciting poems of his own invention to me. Of course, on waking I could only remember bits.
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Poem After the Poem My Cat Wrote in My Dream
Brucemiddlevicious, be still.
The catspaw swishing
The cat's spell, spoken
paws splayed well apart
Amber eyes in dreaming
And better than my own
Be still.
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Yes, "Brucemiddlevicious" was a word in the poem Cappuccino recited, and the last line was "be still." Make of it what you like.
Weird tip of the day: Billy Collins, who I wrote about below as the possible subject of protests, will be featured at the BPC's Fifth Annual Limerick Slam on March 18. So if you like limericks and/or Billy Collins, check it out. You may well choose to protest Collins in the form of composing satirical limericks skewering him and then reciting them to his face. What ho, saucy varlet!
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