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
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