Saturday, January 10, 2004

 

Went to my first poetry reading in NYC at the Bowery Poetry Club today. I went to the weekly Segue Reading; the featured poets were Jen Coleman and the ghost of Frank Sherlock, whose car broke down somewhere in Jersey and couldn't make it. Filling in was C.A. Conrad, who read from his own chapbook, "Frank" (nothing to do with Frank Sherlock) and from some of Sherlock's poems, which someone in the audience had in his bookbag, and which leant further credence to my suspicion that everyone there knew everyone else there. Except me. Maybe. Perhaps they all retreated to a secret location afterwards to discuss my unexpected presence. I rather doubt it, but there was quite a collegiate atmosphere going on. I wondered how everybody knew each other, but I suspect that even in New York, readings tend to turn up more friends of the reading poets than disconnected lovers of the arts.

Jen Coleman is one of the editors of PomPom. She read this poem, which was hilarious. She decribed it as a "translation" from Lao-Tzu. She also gave us poems about dead boyscouts and a census of the fishes, among other things. Here are some other poems of hers, including two visual/collage type things. While she was reading, I noticed a lot of humor, and a love of repetitions and variations.

Frank Sherlock wasn't there, but this poem, and a couple of others, was read in his stead by CA Conrad, who read some of his own poems --the Frank poems, which I gather are becoming a book of their own. I liked them a lot, and as my mother might say, "Of course you would." They have a somewhat Charles-Simic-like turn of the absurd (remember that poem about Simic's grandfather and Freud silently fighting over a pair of shoes in a shop window? Something like that, maybe). I was also interested because I've been working on a series of poems involving a "character." Not too much like Frank, who seems like an everyman of the bizarre, but with some of the same absurdities and weird twists involved.

Sorry not to be more descriptive, but readings always invigorate me to write; they give me ideas and help me figure out what makes my voice different from others. So, I sat there, as I've sat at every reading I've ever attended, scribbling furiously in my notebook with the readers' poems turned into a sort of jazz-background to my own muse. Not that I lacked complete attention to what was going on. Jen Coleman's poems, I noticed, seemed to have "soft landings." When they ended, there wasn't necessarily a reason for them to be over, that I noticed, although that may partially have been ambiguous inflection. Most of my work, the parts that I really like, end with a big PERIOD. Not that I'm dropping anvils on the reader, I hope, but I think that the English sonnet influences my work in the way it unfolds. Question/Conundrum -- Discussion/Wallowing -- Conclusion/Apocalypse. So it goes. I'm often annoyed when my endings are (I think) insufficiently conclusive. Maybe I can learn to back away from that. Or maybe I don't want to. Ending your poems with a shattering gonglike noise may not be the worst habit.

I'll probably check out the Segue reading next week, too. Huzzah.

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