Gegick, Baldinger, Silsbe, Korn, Matcho, & me, and one or two other people, drinking in the back room of Hemingway's... after everyone left, the waitress had come in, sprayed some Comet on the tables... we plugged in the dome hockey game and went at it... eventually people started talking about the syphilis outbreak in McKeesport, or some place like that... Conversations about the area of Pittsburgh outside of the "V", places you'd go to if you had a car... Later in bed, I'm too drunk to sleep, too hot to sleep... innumerable nightmares, can't stop composing everything I think into lines... immersed in lyricism....
T. Hayes spoke to a group of probably 200 people in the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. Terrance has a lot of charm and panache, and his poems are good too. Most notable perhaps was the lullabye he initially declined to sing, despite the crowd's urging; the simple song recounted the tale of a young boy killing a blackbird with a rock, and how the song of the blackbird lived on in the boy, who whistled it to himself as he went home (this last part of the song, describing the boy whistling, was the part Terrance sang). It was a startling metaphor for racial politics executed in a manner more mundane than I've ever seen from Hayes, who usually has long poems which employ a range of devices to weave often complex messages often about race; to see him do something as simple as a lullabye prefigured a sea change, to my mind.
Spent about an hour tooling around in the Carnegie Library before I walked over to Hem's... I had gotten there too late to sit with any of my friends, so I had to balance myself in a chair with the back knocked out, next to some lady who started having a loud cell phone conversation halfway through the reading and had to be escorted out by the decorous Joan Bauer. This was the last Hemingway Summer Reading Series of the summer, so there was occasion for occasion... Jimmy Cvetic kept reminding all the open mic-ers that they could take as much time as they want. And he spent time honoring Joan, who played an integral part of the reading series and I think practically every poetry group I've been a part of this year... she was honored with a special award from the Pittsburgh Poetry Society.
Jimmy himself had a good piece he read after all the readers, a poem in response to the shooting of one of his students from the "police academy for kids" that he runs... a poem decrying everything from guns to gay marriage, mostly just saying "no more [x], no more [y]", ending with him describing a meteor coming down and destroying the earth. Had that level of cynicism that for Jimmy is nothing less than true passion, a police cynicism that looks like cynicism but is in truth honesty. I took a moment to have everyone congratulate and thank Jimmy for running the series, which has been going for "40 years" as I said, although I'm not 100% sure that's the exact correct number of years.
The readers? Baldinger, Korn, Silsbe, et. al., those "30-something" (my estimation) PGH poets who Jimmy introduced as "masters of jackoffery". Their shit's the good shit, I like to think, all that New Yinzer-era labor poetry which is often about Pittsburgh and drinking and personal pain and waitresses. Standout was probably John Korn, who full disclosure is an friend of mine (you might have seen me write a review of one his books) who had a bunch of his semi-surreal/comic poetry about such things as talking to a waitress about astronauts who had claimed to see UFOs and then digging out your eyeball, putting the eyeball in a glass of water, and asking the waitress to drink the water with the eye in it so you can see inside her. Jimmy even went so far as to bring John back up for the final reading, Jimmy saying "I recognize good poetry"; so congratulations to John for that. Other standout was Stephenie Brea who had some seriously audacious poems about an abortion and a female coal miner who had to tolerate the sexual abuse of her coworkers. --poetryburgh@gmail.com
FOR THE RECORD YOU CAN GET ESSENTIALLY EVERY HEMINGWAY'S READING EVER ON THEIR SITE, EVERY READING HAS BEEN RECORDED, INCLUDING ALL THE POEMS I HAVE EVER TALKED ABOUT http://hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com/ SEE JIMMY CVETIC'S "CHICKEN DINNER": http://www.kostany.com/hemingwayspoetryseries/2015-07-28/Jimmy%20Cvetic%20Reads%20Winner%20Winner%20Chicken%20Dinner.mp3
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
POETRYBURGH IN NEW YORK
Well it's true you may have heard the rumors but your good old pal Poetryburgh spent the last couple of days in the good old city of NYC. What was I doing? The New York City Poetry Festival, dear reader, held on Goverener's Island, in a big sandy field, just a ferry ride away from Manhattan. What happened there? There were 3-5 simultaneous stages of poetry, and it was possible to stand at a point in the field where you could hear all of them at the same time. The event occured 11-5 Saturday and Sunday, with 30 minute blocks of time for each registered group of readers: that's 6 x 2 x (3-5) /.5 = 72-120 differentt poetry groups, all under the same tent, so to speak (there was no tent, only: a beer tent).
How was about the poetry? Well, I wasn't impressed by most of it. That's to be expected I suppose: the majority of any group isn't going to be by nature higher quality than the norm. What's significant here is that my PGH norm for poetry isn't all that different from my newly aquired NY norm, i.e. my opinion of PGH poetry in general isn't worse than what I saw in New York. In fact, the quality of the average PGH poem may be a little higher (a bias on my part, perhaps?) The other thing is that there was enough poetry a the festival to create a competitive market. People were screaming, putting on masks, just trying their damndest to be noticed and have their work get out there. This means that more people were doing schlocky things like masks etc. but it also means there was a sustained desire on everyone's part to do their best; the audience could walk away from any stage at any time and go to a different one so there was a "battle of the bands" effect. The other advantage of a teeming ecosystem of poets was that your critic could pick and choose, take sides, play favorites, essentialy have a greater selection of poetry to work with than what is offered in PGH.
So the big question: am I going to move to New York? Well, I've been less excited about the idea, after visiting, than I usually have been. It's not the city itself: everyone was nice, the subways are great, etc. I think it's that my big idea of New York as a "poetry mecca" has been deflated a bit... Not to say that I necessarily saw everthing the city had to offer on my trip, just that: I wasn't so inspired, you know? It's always good to get context for your dreams not just because you can begin to make them real but also because you are able to release some of the ambition's disorienting pull, idealize a little less. Not to say that I've given up on my dreams... I talked to a lot of the festival people, as I am talking to everyone, about my goals and ideas for poetry... Some of them told me that in lieu of moving I should just start something up in Pittsburgh. The idea of a Poetryburgh review or /house or /reading series has been kicking around my head for a while... if I was a little more ambitious, maybe I could get something like that started....
POETRYBURGH'S PICKS FROM NYC:
Noelle Benau / Betty Red[?] .. soundcloud.com/derytteb
Tommy Pico .. heyteebs.tumblr.com
Jay Deshpande .. [Book forthcoming From Yes Yes Press]
Danniel Schoonebeek .. dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com
Apogee Journal
Stonecutter Journal
[not such a long list, huh?? My fault or the city's? I have to admit I find one way more likely] --poetryburgh@gmail.com
How was about the poetry? Well, I wasn't impressed by most of it. That's to be expected I suppose: the majority of any group isn't going to be by nature higher quality than the norm. What's significant here is that my PGH norm for poetry isn't all that different from my newly aquired NY norm, i.e. my opinion of PGH poetry in general isn't worse than what I saw in New York. In fact, the quality of the average PGH poem may be a little higher (a bias on my part, perhaps?) The other thing is that there was enough poetry a the festival to create a competitive market. People were screaming, putting on masks, just trying their damndest to be noticed and have their work get out there. This means that more people were doing schlocky things like masks etc. but it also means there was a sustained desire on everyone's part to do their best; the audience could walk away from any stage at any time and go to a different one so there was a "battle of the bands" effect. The other advantage of a teeming ecosystem of poets was that your critic could pick and choose, take sides, play favorites, essentialy have a greater selection of poetry to work with than what is offered in PGH.
So the big question: am I going to move to New York? Well, I've been less excited about the idea, after visiting, than I usually have been. It's not the city itself: everyone was nice, the subways are great, etc. I think it's that my big idea of New York as a "poetry mecca" has been deflated a bit... Not to say that I necessarily saw everthing the city had to offer on my trip, just that: I wasn't so inspired, you know? It's always good to get context for your dreams not just because you can begin to make them real but also because you are able to release some of the ambition's disorienting pull, idealize a little less. Not to say that I've given up on my dreams... I talked to a lot of the festival people, as I am talking to everyone, about my goals and ideas for poetry... Some of them told me that in lieu of moving I should just start something up in Pittsburgh. The idea of a Poetryburgh review or /house or /reading series has been kicking around my head for a while... if I was a little more ambitious, maybe I could get something like that started....
POETRYBURGH'S PICKS FROM NYC:
Noelle Benau / Betty Red[?] .. soundcloud.com/derytteb
Tommy Pico .. heyteebs.tumblr.com
Jay Deshpande .. [Book forthcoming From Yes Yes Press]
Danniel Schoonebeek .. dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com
Apogee Journal
Stonecutter Journal
[not such a long list, huh?? My fault or the city's? I have to admit I find one way more likely] --poetryburgh@gmail.com
Thursday, July 23, 2015
STEVE ROGGENBUCK & CO. @ BIG IDEA
Steve Roggenbuck, of "national fame" as I keep telling my friends, read at the Big Idea Book Store last night along with four other readers- Paul Cunningham, Savonna Johnson, Liam Swanson, and Becca Cobetto. Becca, Liam, Savonna, Paul: all competent poets, although for me the standout was Liam who kept lying about the number of poems he had left, but had several great poems, including one where he describes feeling like a horse and kicking himself naked in a room in a way that did not feel at all chintzy or innocent. Common theme was either insects or ghosts: Paul sans hockey mask did his pitcher plant poems again, and Savonna and Liam both mentioned bees, Liam at length. Liam also talked about ghosts, and so did Becca; all of her poems were about Spirits and Hell and The Devil etc.
Steve Roggenbuck read at least for half an hour if not forty-five minutes; the majority of his time was not spent reading, however. Steve talked, and with his air of celebrity, we all hung on; he talked about the moon, veganism, "life hacks" etc. At one point I told him to stop talking and read a poem and everyone laughed and looked me and Steve said "you don't know what a poem is!"
The environment was comparable to a childhood sleepover where, drowned with languor, you enter a space beyond what is normal with your friends; it was intimate and anything anyone said became funny. Steve took polls on the crowd over how many bananas people had eaten in one day, and whether or not we personally connected to the cookout scenes from "The Fast and the Furious"; the statement we were to rate our reliability to was "i feel nostalgic for the barbeque scenes in the fast and furious movies as if they were from my own life." This line is a title to one of Steve's poem's- the poem itself more of a story than a poem, is Steve's take, even though it's lineated: the story/poem follows the life of "duncan" who "is a fucker" and says things like "no, i hate your dad... he spray-painted my camper with 'WHO IS RON PAUL' during the 2008 election.. and i still don't forgive him!!" (sic.) Steve's book "Calculating How Big Of A Tip To Give Is The Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out To My Family & Friends" is all like this, filled to the brim with internet language and memes and new sarcasm. In Steve's arms, in his persona when he reads it, it comes alive in this gripping popular way- Steve, for instance, says "hehe" a lot in hispoems stories and in person pronounces it as one word, the same way, every time, for all of his different characters saying it, connoting a kind of mischievous disregard for literary/language conventions as well as whatever the phrase is applied to.
I gotta ask, was occasionally during the reading seriously embroiled in the question of whether or not Steve is being intentional. In the same mold as John Mortara last week, I wondered: how hard has he worked to achieve this cute and silly brand of internet self-awareness? It seems natural... I keep using the phrases "childhood" or "popular" or "sleepover" because the wheelhouse of Steve Roggenbuck is the same humor that was popular in public school and has kind of infiltrated young contemporary poetry through the (now dead) Alt-Lit scene... It's impossible to call it "mature" because no one can be "mature" when they're giggling over a poop joke. Somewhat fair to call it "crude" because the work itself embodies definitions of crudeness: "in a natural or raw state; not yet processed or refined" or "constructed in a rudimentary or makeshift way" (to wit: the uncorrected spelling mistakes, typical of such as internet chat dialogue).
But it would be a mistake to rate Steve's work as low-quality or unimportant; it is a raw and serious power involved when you've got a room full of people absorbed in your poems! Steve might call this "boost", I would claim, if I understood the term as he uses it online; and although Steve's performance was in content and format often something more like a comedy act than a reading there was a sense of something greater at work, and not just because of Steve's celebrity. Steve had a liberal politics he would bring up but I don't think this is where we ended up, listening to him; I feel like mostly what was portrayed was a voice for the young generation of the audience; Steve himself jokingly pointed this out (about viz. "Calculating How Big..."): "relatable titles- captures the zeitgeist!" During his reading I think we were all able to return to the place that voice came from- sort of an ironic hysteria, everyone laughing at the baby-like language coming out of the poet's mouth, and him, too, laughing, to the point where it was occasionally hard for him to finish. Despite the ostensible flippancy of the spirit that Steve captures, Steve heightened it to a level of communion. And where else for nuance but in spiritual experience?--poetryburgh@gmail.com
The environment was comparable to a childhood sleepover where, drowned with languor, you enter a space beyond what is normal with your friends; it was intimate and anything anyone said became funny. Steve took polls on the crowd over how many bananas people had eaten in one day, and whether or not we personally connected to the cookout scenes from "The Fast and the Furious"; the statement we were to rate our reliability to was "i feel nostalgic for the barbeque scenes in the fast and furious movies as if they were from my own life." This line is a title to one of Steve's poem's- the poem itself more of a story than a poem, is Steve's take, even though it's lineated: the story/poem follows the life of "duncan" who "is a fucker" and says things like "no, i hate your dad... he spray-painted my camper with 'WHO IS RON PAUL' during the 2008 election.. and i still don't forgive him!!" (sic.) Steve's book "Calculating How Big Of A Tip To Give Is The Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out To My Family & Friends" is all like this, filled to the brim with internet language and memes and new sarcasm. In Steve's arms, in his persona when he reads it, it comes alive in this gripping popular way- Steve, for instance, says "hehe" a lot in his
I gotta ask, was occasionally during the reading seriously embroiled in the question of whether or not Steve is being intentional. In the same mold as John Mortara last week, I wondered: how hard has he worked to achieve this cute and silly brand of internet self-awareness? It seems natural... I keep using the phrases "childhood" or "popular" or "sleepover" because the wheelhouse of Steve Roggenbuck is the same humor that was popular in public school and has kind of infiltrated young contemporary poetry through the (now dead) Alt-Lit scene... It's impossible to call it "mature" because no one can be "mature" when they're giggling over a poop joke. Somewhat fair to call it "crude" because the work itself embodies definitions of crudeness: "in a natural or raw state; not yet processed or refined" or "constructed in a rudimentary or makeshift way" (to wit: the uncorrected spelling mistakes, typical of such as internet chat dialogue).
But it would be a mistake to rate Steve's work as low-quality or unimportant; it is a raw and serious power involved when you've got a room full of people absorbed in your poems! Steve might call this "boost", I would claim, if I understood the term as he uses it online; and although Steve's performance was in content and format often something more like a comedy act than a reading there was a sense of something greater at work, and not just because of Steve's celebrity. Steve had a liberal politics he would bring up but I don't think this is where we ended up, listening to him; I feel like mostly what was portrayed was a voice for the young generation of the audience; Steve himself jokingly pointed this out (about viz. "Calculating How Big..."): "relatable titles- captures the zeitgeist!" During his reading I think we were all able to return to the place that voice came from- sort of an ironic hysteria, everyone laughing at the baby-like language coming out of the poet's mouth, and him, too, laughing, to the point where it was occasionally hard for him to finish. Despite the ostensible flippancy of the spirit that Steve captures, Steve heightened it to a level of communion. And where else for nuance but in spiritual experience?--poetryburgh@gmail.com
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Last Runaway Studios / Hay Street Reading Series ft. Me
Runaway Studio's last in their monthly Verse Sessions, open mics featuring mostly young poets, happened last night, at the tail end of a full day of performances at Andy McIntyre and Sadie Shaof's studio, home, and roof. Decorating the spaces at Runaway Stuidos were the remnants of the space's last art show: plaster sculptures, photographs with holes burned in them, large plastic sheets with drawings of naked bodies.
I showed up at 5:30, in time to catch the first half of Andy's play, entitled "Memories of One Night Stands" (paraphrased). This took place in Andy and Sadie's presumable bedroom, with the audience crowding the small space. The two actors in the play moved back and forth on the bed, went to the bathroom (and simulated bathroom sounds) danced to music, and discussed their relationship in broad, abstract terms. On the wall of the bedroom were written large words having something to do with the individual's context in society. It took about 10 minutes, and Andy stood in the corner DJ'ing the various musical tracks.
The second half of the play was stage read, with Andy calling out occasional stage directions that the actors didn't have to perform. This happened about three or four hours later, during the Verse Session part of the evening, in the large warehouse-like space of Runaway Studios (it was previously a sign-making factory, as the equipment in the basement still evidences). In between these two halves of the play I had somewhat dangerously biked down Penn Avenue semi-intoxicated with only one working brake all the way to the Hay Street Reading Series in Wilkinsburg, where I was slated to read. Kelsey Leach and Whitney Hayes run the series, and they had produced another lively crowd of about twenty people, many of them Chatham grad students. Readings that night prominently featured Kinsley Stocum and Sarah Shotland who talked about video games and prison, respectively.
Kinsley Stocum was great because she was able to pull off the difficult challenge of talking about such an ingrown subject as video gaming while still being relatable enough to perform a sincere emotional effort. My favorite line: "I lose control of the sticks, my gun's spinning towards the sky" (paraphrased). Sarah Shotland was good because she explored the somewhat taboo effects of a woman in prison, her being a jailhouse educator; she recognized the danger that she herself brings. "I'm a tick filled up with the outside and everyone wants me to land on their toe".
After I biked all the way back up Penn Avenue more drunk with still one brake and only one working light, I was able to return to Runaway Studios just in time for the the poetry of the collected readers. Every performer had something to say about Runaway Studios as preamble to their work; Jacob Mays and Daniel Jones Vincent and Carla (last name unrecorded) gave particularly impassioned speeches about how the Studio was a magical place that made a huge difference, how it was even like a family to some of them. All of this was somewhat and saddingly ironic to me, dear reader, because if you've been following my blog you know that my largest goal is to find a poetic community.
I've been a few times to the Verse Sessions before and was always unimpressed; and it's for that reason I haven't spent as much time as could there. I think my grinch's heart for poetry grew size or two last night, though. It was indescribably hot in the Studio and there was no AC; everyone was fanning themselves with their poems to cool down. I had stayed up the previous night to revise the work I read at Hay St and was falling asleep during the musical performances; but for the poetry I stayed up. It wasn't "better" than it usually was but I started to want to stop using the metric "better" to describe anyone's work after a while. I was rooted in my seat, slowly detoxing and then retoxing with alcohol, after midnight with 15 other people who all knew each other, and as Carla pointed out, "we all stink, and I love it." Some guy came up to read a poem by Yates, "Adam's Curse" and I was taken by the performance; he read with such a slow and quiet strength:
"That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon." --poetryburgh@gmail.com
I showed up at 5:30, in time to catch the first half of Andy's play, entitled "Memories of One Night Stands" (paraphrased). This took place in Andy and Sadie's presumable bedroom, with the audience crowding the small space. The two actors in the play moved back and forth on the bed, went to the bathroom (and simulated bathroom sounds) danced to music, and discussed their relationship in broad, abstract terms. On the wall of the bedroom were written large words having something to do with the individual's context in society. It took about 10 minutes, and Andy stood in the corner DJ'ing the various musical tracks.
The second half of the play was stage read, with Andy calling out occasional stage directions that the actors didn't have to perform. This happened about three or four hours later, during the Verse Session part of the evening, in the large warehouse-like space of Runaway Studios (it was previously a sign-making factory, as the equipment in the basement still evidences). In between these two halves of the play I had somewhat dangerously biked down Penn Avenue semi-intoxicated with only one working brake all the way to the Hay Street Reading Series in Wilkinsburg, where I was slated to read. Kelsey Leach and Whitney Hayes run the series, and they had produced another lively crowd of about twenty people, many of them Chatham grad students. Readings that night prominently featured Kinsley Stocum and Sarah Shotland who talked about video games and prison, respectively.
Kinsley Stocum was great because she was able to pull off the difficult challenge of talking about such an ingrown subject as video gaming while still being relatable enough to perform a sincere emotional effort. My favorite line: "I lose control of the sticks, my gun's spinning towards the sky" (paraphrased). Sarah Shotland was good because she explored the somewhat taboo effects of a woman in prison, her being a jailhouse educator; she recognized the danger that she herself brings. "I'm a tick filled up with the outside and everyone wants me to land on their toe".
After I biked all the way back up Penn Avenue more drunk with still one brake and only one working light, I was able to return to Runaway Studios just in time for the the poetry of the collected readers. Every performer had something to say about Runaway Studios as preamble to their work; Jacob Mays and Daniel Jones Vincent and Carla (last name unrecorded) gave particularly impassioned speeches about how the Studio was a magical place that made a huge difference, how it was even like a family to some of them. All of this was somewhat and saddingly ironic to me, dear reader, because if you've been following my blog you know that my largest goal is to find a poetic community.
I've been a few times to the Verse Sessions before and was always unimpressed; and it's for that reason I haven't spent as much time as could there. I think my grinch's heart for poetry grew size or two last night, though. It was indescribably hot in the Studio and there was no AC; everyone was fanning themselves with their poems to cool down. I had stayed up the previous night to revise the work I read at Hay St and was falling asleep during the musical performances; but for the poetry I stayed up. It wasn't "better" than it usually was but I started to want to stop using the metric "better" to describe anyone's work after a while. I was rooted in my seat, slowly detoxing and then retoxing with alcohol, after midnight with 15 other people who all knew each other, and as Carla pointed out, "we all stink, and I love it." Some guy came up to read a poem by Yates, "Adam's Curse" and I was taken by the performance; he read with such a slow and quiet strength:
"That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon." --poetryburgh@gmail.com
Monday, July 13, 2015
EX3: john mortara, dan mckloskey & some guy with a hockey mask
Really excellent reading, part of the John Mortara book tour. John Mortara delivered their work at first without paper in a loud busk, with almost a nervousness, and he invited the audience to applaud in order to make him feel more comfortable. John's poetry for the most part as I read it had a kind of jovial sarcasm and playfulness which when read out loud had a seriousness John lent to it, a feeling that they had spent a lot of time with what you might consider frivolous admissions. They had a long love poem which compared their love to segments of the Terminator and Alien movies. It was good, and very funny, while still being sincere and true: "Unfortunately, my love can not self-terminate, so you will have to push the button that lowers it into the lava." (parapharsed).
The first reader was hockey-mask guy, Paul Cunningham, who donned a custom-made hockey mask which matched the picture on the back of his chapbook, "Goal/Tender Meat/Tender." This chapbook was designed to talk about the experience of cannibalism during procreation, that of the female Praying Mantis, as re-enacted in a hockey rink. Paul wore a Penns shirt; apparently he has just moved in to Bloomfield, which is great, because he was good- the guy's an MFA from Notre Dame, and has that literary training to put together complex sound poems which have overarching and well-thought out theses played through them. I did get a sense of the cannibalism/procreation thing when he read, through a series of harsh, short, and even sexy explosive language, delivered convincingly through the mask. Masks have always had this Noh Theater thing for me where I get the sense that the point of the mask is to externalize the acting, for the mask to rule over the actor and for the actor to drive it, like a mecha; to create a pictoral representation of something other than (just) a human face. That thesis, the mask as a performance tool, played out well. Paul also had a few poems in the same fast-paced-percussive-but-well-measured manner about things like a toxic lake in china/ pitcher plants.
Dan McCloskey is writing Lesser-Known Predator short stories every time he is asked to read; last time he had a wig and pretended to write a letter onstage to act out his character, an old lady beset by lobsters. This time he just invited us to close our eyes, but said we didn't have to if that made us feel nervous. Like all the stories in the series this one was very good, had that gut-punch following the long drawn out anticipation that good short stories can do; it was about a woman who had a tunnel to some underground caves in her basement.
What made me nervous was the conversation I had afterward with Dan. Not the first, but the second, which happened after his s/o Sarah invitied me to talk to Dan about the history of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse. The C.A. house "began" in 2006, didn't start having artists until 2008. Dan invited me to start my own artist's collective, and I told him about my plans to move to New York, and that's when I freaked out. I was standing on a streetcorner afterwards, out of the rain, and cursing myself and talking to myself, and I ended up writing poems on the backs of the books I had bought, which was good. What freaked me out, I think, was just talking to Sarah and Dan about my hopes and dreams, "how I wanted my life to be about art." They got it, were understanding, and there was nothing wrong about what I said; but some invisible barrier had been crossed, for me, and now I was asking them for help. Why was that a problem? I'm always running from the things I desire most... understandable...
R/B Mertz also read and had some excellent poems about the police, suggesting maybe the thing that they too should do is grieve --poetryburgh@gmail.com
Dan McCloskey is writing Lesser-Known Predator short stories every time he is asked to read; last time he had a wig and pretended to write a letter onstage to act out his character, an old lady beset by lobsters. This time he just invited us to close our eyes, but said we didn't have to if that made us feel nervous. Like all the stories in the series this one was very good, had that gut-punch following the long drawn out anticipation that good short stories can do; it was about a woman who had a tunnel to some underground caves in her basement.
What made me nervous was the conversation I had afterward with Dan. Not the first, but the second, which happened after his s/o Sarah invitied me to talk to Dan about the history of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse. The C.A. house "began" in 2006, didn't start having artists until 2008. Dan invited me to start my own artist's collective, and I told him about my plans to move to New York, and that's when I freaked out. I was standing on a streetcorner afterwards, out of the rain, and cursing myself and talking to myself, and I ended up writing poems on the backs of the books I had bought, which was good. What freaked me out, I think, was just talking to Sarah and Dan about my hopes and dreams, "how I wanted my life to be about art." They got it, were understanding, and there was nothing wrong about what I said; but some invisible barrier had been crossed, for me, and now I was asking them for help. Why was that a problem? I'm always running from the things I desire most... understandable...
R/B Mertz also read and had some excellent poems about the police, suggesting maybe the thing that they too should do is grieve --poetryburgh@gmail.com
Friday, July 10, 2015
Why do I only like live poetry?
Good point. I don't know.
Maybe it's the personality that the physical people bring?
Maybe it's the crowd which tolerates it?
Maybe it's the sound? And the reading?
Better yet, the question, what makes written poetry so intolerable (to me)?
Ed Orchester had a poem about this:
"I hate it too...
The arch writing
The endless self reference
The obscure meanings"
(heavily, heavily paraphrased)
I think he was referring to all poetry,
even the spoken stuff. He mentioned
"open mics":
"imagine the longest most intolerable open mic you've ever been to"
(this in comparison to the artistic work of the emperor Niro)
I think the things I like about spoken poetry,
the ability to challenge me, the kind of terrifying, outspoken, original work,
is not what I look for in written work.
Like with all media, I need it to be absorbing,
or I stop reading/watching/looking.
I only trust that which has an immediate appeal.
When I'm at someone's live reading, I can't leave.
I can stop listening, with my immediate attention, and I can think about something else, like my ex-girlfriends.
But some part of me is always listening. And there are often moments where I'm not listening and I'm
pulled back in.
"Hooks."
Like when Ed Orchester said the quote above about Open Mics. I had to start listening.
Sometimes, the whole set is unignorable,
like with Jimmy Cvetic on Tuesday, who used a bizarre range of
multimedia and messages within his work,
spoke with such a heightened conviction that for me,
who knew Jimmy, a relatively calm guy I thought at all times,
I had to watch. When a poet has "hooks"
I have to pay attention. I suppose,
that's the trouble with written work...
it might have "hooks", but because I'm not actually there,
no part of me has to keep on listening when there's no "hook" and so I climb out of the pond altogether.
--poetryburgh@gmail.com
Maybe it's the personality that the physical people bring?
Maybe it's the crowd which tolerates it?
Maybe it's the sound? And the reading?
Better yet, the question, what makes written poetry so intolerable (to me)?
Ed Orchester had a poem about this:
"I hate it too...
The arch writing
The endless self reference
The obscure meanings"
(heavily, heavily paraphrased)
I think he was referring to all poetry,
even the spoken stuff. He mentioned
"open mics":
"imagine the longest most intolerable open mic you've ever been to"
(this in comparison to the artistic work of the emperor Niro)
I think the things I like about spoken poetry,
the ability to challenge me, the kind of terrifying, outspoken, original work,
is not what I look for in written work.
Like with all media, I need it to be absorbing,
or I stop reading/watching/looking.
I only trust that which has an immediate appeal.
When I'm at someone's live reading, I can't leave.
I can stop listening, with my immediate attention, and I can think about something else, like my ex-girlfriends.
But some part of me is always listening. And there are often moments where I'm not listening and I'm
pulled back in.
"Hooks."
Like when Ed Orchester said the quote above about Open Mics. I had to start listening.
Sometimes, the whole set is unignorable,
like with Jimmy Cvetic on Tuesday, who used a bizarre range of
multimedia and messages within his work,
spoke with such a heightened conviction that for me,
who knew Jimmy, a relatively calm guy I thought at all times,
I had to watch. When a poet has "hooks"
I have to pay attention. I suppose,
that's the trouble with written work...
it might have "hooks", but because I'm not actually there,
no part of me has to keep on listening when there's no "hook" and so I climb out of the pond altogether.
--poetryburgh@gmail.com
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Hemingways: Night of 7/7, Michael Wurster, Judith Volmer, Terrance Hayes, Ed Orchester, Jimmy Cvetic
T. Hayes reads "Arbor for Butch" and a poem from How To Be Drawn, the one about having 192 kids with 192 women from the 192 nations of the world. Terrance, with like a wave of people behind him as he sits in the audience, seems like a celebrity, must deal with people after the event is over as if he were a celebrity. I got a chance to read in front of him, and drunk(-ish), I felt a powerful giving-over of myself while I read, as if inspired... After, as I squeezed past him to get back to my seat, I did not meet Terrance's eyes... I was able to restrain myself.
I was sitting in the inside corner of Hemingway's bifocals-shaped back room, unable, without leaning in front of my neighbor's presumable line of sight, to see the poets, so I mostly focused on their voices. Somewhat remarkable maybe how unimportant it was to see anyone's face; all these old men with their dead skin and fat hardly moving, but with such voices! Jimmy Cvetic, Ed Orchester, and Terrance Hayes all gave good performances. Terrance's reading was less notable for his par-for-the-course excellence, being a nationally lauded poet and all, and I don't think his 192 children poem is that good anyway. Jimmy, in a racially dubious moment, began his set by addressing Terrance, saying he had a song/poem based off a negro spiritual (I don't think he said "negro") and then he leaned in to the mic and intoned, hardly singing in the way people with about one band of vocal communication available to them sing, "no pussy for Jimmy / no pussy for Jimmy/ no pussy for Jimmy."
Jimmy Cvetic's set was unbelievable in the way that good poetry can be, I believe. First off after the moment with Hayes he pulled out a CD player and played a short thirty second clip of children's vocals singing a song that sounded more or less like the opening theme to "Doc McStuffins", this, apparently, something Jimmy wrote and got some kids to record, a song he woke up with at 3 AM one morning. "No more trouble, no more snails, pails or puppy dog tails" is about all I can remember from the lyrics, the song itself bright and upbeat and well produced enough that I'm still not 100% convinced it was really Jimmy's work. But he wore a t-shirt, red text on black, that said "Dog is a Poet", a shirt that he apparently wore when buying heroin, "to [evince] a certain craziness... it's hard to describe but you needed a certain craziness out there, hard to describe why unless you were out on the street, buying heroin!" The red standing for the blood of the broken hearts of policing, and the black for chaos, as he tells us, the monologues between poems kind of slipping in with the poems themselves. He read poems about his former police life,and tells us about a program he's running for kids, a police academy for kids, "the thin gold line." I ask him about his poetry after the reading and he says: "It's a way of life for me". Jimmy, last week, talked about the "way of life" visible in the work of all the poets in the Series, that that was what made their work great, this "way of life". For me, this quality is what I find so unbelievable about Jimmy, a kind of straightforwardness and humility about experience that seems impossible, all of the somewhat insane & disparate segments of a man and his performance coming together to describe something human.
Also that night was Michael Wurster, who reads his poems with such bland monotone occasionlessness that I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to get behind them yet. Joan Baur was sitting in the corner opposite mine and I got to look at her reactions and watch her applaud as if she were leading the crowd, sometimes, as she did I think during Michael's and maybe my reading, although she never did it without a personal sincerity. Ed Orchester had poems which were amazing and true enough for me that I'm considering buying his physical work with the hope of reading it to myself and enjoying it, which would be a near first for poetryburgh --poetryburgh@gmail.com
I was sitting in the inside corner of Hemingway's bifocals-shaped back room, unable, without leaning in front of my neighbor's presumable line of sight, to see the poets, so I mostly focused on their voices. Somewhat remarkable maybe how unimportant it was to see anyone's face; all these old men with their dead skin and fat hardly moving, but with such voices! Jimmy Cvetic, Ed Orchester, and Terrance Hayes all gave good performances. Terrance's reading was less notable for his par-for-the-course excellence, being a nationally lauded poet and all, and I don't think his 192 children poem is that good anyway. Jimmy, in a racially dubious moment, began his set by addressing Terrance, saying he had a song/poem based off a negro spiritual (I don't think he said "negro") and then he leaned in to the mic and intoned, hardly singing in the way people with about one band of vocal communication available to them sing, "no pussy for Jimmy / no pussy for Jimmy/ no pussy for Jimmy."
Jimmy Cvetic's set was unbelievable in the way that good poetry can be, I believe. First off after the moment with Hayes he pulled out a CD player and played a short thirty second clip of children's vocals singing a song that sounded more or less like the opening theme to "Doc McStuffins", this, apparently, something Jimmy wrote and got some kids to record, a song he woke up with at 3 AM one morning. "No more trouble, no more snails, pails or puppy dog tails" is about all I can remember from the lyrics, the song itself bright and upbeat and well produced enough that I'm still not 100% convinced it was really Jimmy's work. But he wore a t-shirt, red text on black, that said "Dog is a Poet", a shirt that he apparently wore when buying heroin, "to [evince] a certain craziness... it's hard to describe but you needed a certain craziness out there, hard to describe why unless you were out on the street, buying heroin!" The red standing for the blood of the broken hearts of policing, and the black for chaos, as he tells us, the monologues between poems kind of slipping in with the poems themselves. He read poems about his former police life,and tells us about a program he's running for kids, a police academy for kids, "the thin gold line." I ask him about his poetry after the reading and he says: "It's a way of life for me". Jimmy, last week, talked about the "way of life" visible in the work of all the poets in the Series, that that was what made their work great, this "way of life". For me, this quality is what I find so unbelievable about Jimmy, a kind of straightforwardness and humility about experience that seems impossible, all of the somewhat insane & disparate segments of a man and his performance coming together to describe something human.
Also that night was Michael Wurster, who reads his poems with such bland monotone occasionlessness that I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to get behind them yet. Joan Baur was sitting in the corner opposite mine and I got to look at her reactions and watch her applaud as if she were leading the crowd, sometimes, as she did I think during Michael's and maybe my reading, although she never did it without a personal sincerity. Ed Orchester had poems which were amazing and true enough for me that I'm considering buying his physical work with the hope of reading it to myself and enjoying it, which would be a near first for poetryburgh --poetryburgh@gmail.com
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