Ben Gwin, Jennifer Bannan, Ben Stein, Michael T. Fournier @ East End

Host Karen Lillis introduced the night as "three novelists and a poet"; the poet was Ben Stein. Ben Stein reads with a lilting thick and high voice, and his poems covered everyday topics; many of these poems were from a collection of "Sunday Poems"; he and long-distance friends would send each other poems on Sunday.

"Either this cat think he's laundry,
or the half-empty hamper
is too warm to pass up"
- from "Apartment"

Ben Gwin and Michael Fournier both read fiction, in a way that really turns my dials: clear enunciation, slow and measured, stories about "fucking" or in the case of Mike, fast food service and "punching people in the face." All emotional rumination in their stories happened more or less in the context of action, and in simple-ish sentences. Mike did the voices of some of the characters-- these are all the qualities I would look for in performed poetry, a kind of conservancy of words, making an emotional impact with only a few tools. Plus they were both thirty-something-plus deep-voiced writers, reading stories about blunt subject matter, which as I said are just some things that I go for. And I'll honor that:  the writing that appeals to you immediately is the stuff that gets to the meat of what writing can be in our world.

I talked to Karen Lillis after the show in what was one of my most productive blog-network-conversations yet. She talked about composing and promoting readings, the trick thereof being inviting writers from several different "cliques", therefore bringing in several different audiences. Poetry in PGH is apparently made of "weird little bubbles" of people (this quote overheard from Ben Gwin in an adjacent convo). As I expressed to Karen, "it would be great for me [poetryburgh] just to know about all of those cliques." So, if anything, that's one good use of the blog part of this blog: I can verbally detail these different groups, come up with good ways of describing them, share my thoughts, document them, maybe make them a little less disparate, as Karen was doing.

I'm going to the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange workshop tonight, as I said I would, so I'll have more to share on that group of people and their sensibilities. --poetryburgh@gmail.com