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
No comments:
Post a Comment