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
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