Anyway, this was the first Frequency Series reading for the spring. Met some people, including Shafer Hall and Dan Nester. I talked poor Shafer's ear off. He was victim of his own friendliness and the fact that he looks exactly like my former boss, whose ear I also used to talk off. And the cycle continues.
Reading today were Ellen Hagan, Deborah Ager, and Sanjana Nair. Ellen read a series of dramatic monologues; I gather that some of them were written in conjunction with her students. They were all about becoming or being a woman, some of them in a very funny "I am a nerd getting her first kiss" kind of way, and some in a much darker vein. She bookended her reading with the funny ones, lest we all go kill ourselves over violence against women, or seeing as how the reading took place in a bar, drink ourselves into a depressive stupor. Had to love the last one about a seventh-grade or so girl whose crush on a guy named Chad had led her to name their three future children as follows: Chad, Jr., Chadwick, and Chadwell.
Deborah Ager is pictured here, eyeing the camera as though she were pretty sure it was feeding her a line of bullshit. She is founder of 32 Poems Magazine, and opened her reading with a couple of poems by other poets that were featured in the magazine. She then went on to read a few of her own, which dealt heavily with landscape. Seeing as how I've spent the last few weeks bathing myself in language poetry, I was nearly floored by the sudden reminder that one can use "I" in a poem, and, you know, write in a confessional mode. If she'd had the gumption to rhyme, I would have fallen over stiff as a board and would have to be unfrozen with hairdryers, like a car lock in Minnesota. She did not rhyme, however, and read about the coast of Florida, San Francisco, Iowa, and to end up on a happy note, about a turtle.
Finally, Sanjana Nair read, beginning with an ancient Indian poem by a woman called Vivia. Sanjana read with a deep, even, modulated voice, poems about writing and longing...I took one line down, which I hope I got right:
the dialogue of dancing has become a foreign nation.
Basically, througout the whole reading, I was stunned by context. Cause and effect were in their appointed places. Things happened because of other things that made logical sense. Not so much supping the word broth from the random ladle that I've experienced at Segue.
Afterwards, people chatted and hung around the bar --The Four Faced Liar in the West Village, which was really cozy. Chatted a bit myself and then went on my merry way. Looking forward to the next reading, in two weeks, which will feature Erica Kaufman and Catherine Daly.
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