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 his poems 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