Eclipse Lounge, Blast Furnace

Last night I showed up at the Eclipse Lounge for the release of Blast Furnace's new Mixtape, a Poetry eBook. These were "original poems inspired by music" by: Heather McNaugher, Bob Walicki, Carolyne Whelan, and Rebecca Clever. Several of the artists talked about the influence of The Cure, etc. on their childhoods: rushing home to listen to their songs, memorizing lyrics, applying the music's wisdom to their day-to-day lives. All the poetry was along the lines of narrative, fiction-like stuff with line breaks and enunciation like you would expect from slam, but read off paper and less performative. It's the kind of stuff Jeff Oaks does, although he's a little more literary.

My favorite work came from Carolyne and Heather. Standout moment was when a firetruck passed as Carolyne read her poem "Firewalker". One of Heather's poems was cool because it mentioned biking down a hill in high school as to have illicit sex. Also from Heather: "High School still rages evidently."

The tone of the Lounge itself- $7 Southern Tier, long cushioned couch-like benches, dark, the stage directly next to the front door and featuring a picture window looking out onto the street. It was a 30- 40- year old crowd. 

I spend a lot of my time listening to poems kind of spacing out and just hearing the sound of the poet's reading. There's a lot of territory here; and I realized listening to Sunshine Ears you don't need the contrivance of language to get "lyricism" [I abuse a lot of terms on this blog]. But there were several moments during last night's reading where I snapped out of my haze and paid attention. The illicit sex moment was one of them... I've talked about this before... Something very important there --poetryburgh@gmail.com