More Than One Langauge Does Help

Some of us poets have been talking about the nature of the reading--its form and why we go and what we hope to get out of going. I decided to look outside of poetry and asked Chloë Bass, Artist and Public Practitioner, for help with these questions. Through a series of conversations, we created a moment in the reading where the people in the audience had an opportunity to talk to each other and think out some of their responses to the poems they were listening to. Additionally, the thing about poetry readings is the audience is normally filled with the type of people who go to poetry readings. I not only wanted to give them an opportunity to think through some of the themes of the work with each other, but I wanted to give myself the opportunity to learn from/hear back their ideas.  Here's a short video of what Chloë and I came up with and some of the audience responses.

The Best Kept Secret

From Union Station to Penn Station

I began to feel the pleasure of the weightless state between here and there.

-Leslie Feinberg

This is a photograph of Union Station in Los Angeles. The beginning of a cross-country train trip. I flew out to LA from Newark and spent a couple of days in Venice then took the city bus to the station.

From Union Station, I took the Coast Starlight to Oakland Jack London Square Station and walked to my hotel.

 

Because of floods in Iowa (to get the trains back on schedule the train I booked was canceled), I ended up with two nights in Oakland and took the BART to my spot for the second night and from there the city bus to Emeryville Station

where I caught the California Zephyr to Denver Union Station.

I was picked up and dropped off at Denver Union Station in a champagne Kia SUV and continued on the California Zephyr to Chicago Union Station.

I took the Metra to and from Chicago Union Station.

 

 

From Chicago Union Station I picked up the Cardinal and took it to the flag stop Thurmond. I traveled to and from Thurmond by taxi...saw three fawns frolicking in a front yard during the first cab ride, which the driver on the second cab ride told me how the first driver had told him about them, I heard you saw three fawns on the cab ride there. Yes, it felt very special.

From Thurmond I continued on the Cardinal to Newark Pennsylvania Station and walked the rest of the way home.

Live Writing Notes from My Kind of Happening: Short Texts on the Future Nature of the Reading

Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at 8:00pm
Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church

Questions have arisen about the nature and intention of what we at The Poetry Project have circled around and made a place for nearly fifty years. There should always be questions. Answering a call for poetry, prose, performances or other unnameable forms of meditation, poets give and take on the questions WHAT IS A READING? What should it be? What is read there? And to whom? These are questions about space, place, text and community. Starting fresh for 2015.
with Anselm Berrigan, Eric Conroe, Ariel Goldberg, Krystal Languell, Eileen Myles, Natalie Peart, Jennifer Tamayo, and others.

Simone White:
Charles and the relationship of sound to readings.

What the valences of the word do: reading

We read and we perform

Reading space. What sit about who comes why who is standing in front of you.

What the outstanding questions are

What is a reading what should it become are there too many readings

What do we think about racial sexual division

Public time

Poetics of the reading space

How do we foreground questions of writing

Amiri Baraka Ginsberg intro Naropa 1978

The loss of baraka to that community

Marxist Leninist maotstung thought

This is a communist poem an Afro ???? Lyric

Be about what needs to be only revolution will set us free

Ariel Goldberg
Oakland 25 first reading. Converted store front. Work in progress. Also a party.

Learn about someone's work. Deceptive intimacy.

The loneliness of being in the audience.

Then girlfriends who help gain access

Wrote a book about community and enstragement

Gender categories are the bane of my existence

The feeling of who is not here/there as a problem

White privilege as

Boyer spoke about how white poets aren't talking about race

Even though 2012 everyone was all over occupy

Trace Peterson

Clamour gladman's zine found in the library

Eric Conroe

Corinne--dance. Real time and real things performance in a commodity based economy

About other people and in rooms with other people

I could do with more political enemies in my circle of friends

Listening

What it means by failure of the family

Gleefully

We have made a kind of house here whether you like it or not

Krystal Languell

Similar questions after awp. Response to mysoginost reading and then response to backlash.

Audience member. Poet performer. Curator.

Excess length and sexist double sin

If something goes wrong important gestures to be made

Do I have a torch can i torch things

Free flowing revolving door safe space

Not invited. To a wedding. Much more like a funeral.

Leslie Scalipino memorial

Akilah Oliver

Due diligence of as anti-racist ally. Was replaced

When i die want a memorial

JT

When I read I am trying to overthrow your governments

The protest is probably the best reading

Let there be fire on earth

Can readings be a controversy

Disagreement

A zone of safe unsafety

Terrify and surprise myself. Politicize myself

Moved to what beyond the reading

Counting as torture

I want attention

Stop clowning around let the poem speak for itself

I don't want to be an unnatural event antimatter crater

Natalie Peart
Salon space cocreated with a friend. Brooklyn ladies text based salon
Can be hostile. People in the room or not in the room.
Montana Ray cocreator. Push back about misogyny. Women and queer. 8 artists in any medium. Each gets 8 minutes. Large diversity. Egos checked at the door. Wanted great people to meet other great people. Warm but can be long. Invite guest curators. In attempting to be inclusive how do we still exclude.
Drawing up a text about what doing. Still in process.
Not having hierarchy in readers or audience. Everyone squeezed.

Eileen Myles
"Reading"
Grade school class called reading. A lot about voice and gender sounding. Desire for acknowledgement and long stretches of reading aloud.

Cult of awe around the spoken word.

The thing itself and what we do afterward.

Read the thing for the first time that you never read out loud. Then they begin to have volume self worth.

Standup. Addiction to response pot.

The child wanted to be the teacher.

The problems of time and power.

The boundaries are kept.

Except when they are not. About gender. Who can speak from the audience.

You may or may not be part of a family.

Who is that old white man talking. Wanted to make him a thing. An object.

Naming names. Rob halpern. Gail Scott. Ron silliman. Larry fagen

Maureen Owen made her write a letter to the board. Larry Fagen not the poetry project. We can't make sick fucks go away but we can make institutions porous.

Jack Collom at Naropa

Have to be the fight so that you can feel safe otherwise be angry

Don't destroy the apparatus

Would you agree to be in something that thinks about itself. Couldn't  agree if in a relationship.

Saw the church burn

12step before project felt more liberatory

Felt like should say every name if said Michael brown.


Simone. Readers can ask another reader a question. Then audience can get join conversation.

A: Krystal are you coming out from your rock?

K: I am working on it. I am here.

Ei: Nathalie what about lady

N: gal. Lady not used as much. Broadly defined.

Ei: ladies gals broad chicks

S: jawn

Ei: how ladies is prejoeative

Shelagh: try to use ladies as gender neutral term like guys

Aud: class

Tonya: southern

N: Jennifer and Eileen. Contrast. J is throwing be external

J: think about the ways I can be unfixed. Forgetting myself. Not undo myself. I wouldn't categorize your reading as inwardly. Dynamic. Set and then deviation.

Ei: internal writing being a poet gesture of stepping up into the mic. This thing gave us permission. Something very visceral about J's work. Poetry is the inside and outside.

S: audience member but also in charge. James Tate once gave a reading I am not a clown. Pick up your stuff from the floor. With a clown face. How do you come back to yourself.

J: commit myself to its inelgance afterward. Catalogue that intensity of feeling of performer and person who goes out in the world. So when it's inelegant. Like this excess of feminity.

Ei: to go and pick up for you. No poet  roadie.

Aud: only excess is excess of going past attention.

Ei: what makes us feels tightened and what makes us feel loosen.

Aud: performer breaks mode

Aud: question. Heckling your own story line is how you exist in a space. You disrupt something.

Aud: talk about feeling anxious and isolated. How did it feel to talk about it.

K: large part the nature of the rock I hid under. I didn't go as an audience. When I didn't have a job to do couldn't go for a while. If I don't have anything to do there what is my business. Is it social. No.

A: everyone in ny is broke in time. Am I going to this. Like analogy of couples counseling. I am happy to be here it is hard to be here.

Er: more the performance. The accidental. Avant garde strives for that. In terms of anxiety, hosting a series i used to host. Relinquished power I didn't know I had. Kicking myself. People didn't know the subtext. All i could do was read from previous work.

Aud: lady was taken out of context because it was incendiary. Now slyly slipped back in circulation.

Aud: ladies against women. In the 1990s.

N: what keeps us from heckling. What do you want. What

S: BLT social. Not about having sex. Because that is what it can be about. 8 minute limit is ingenious. Conversation that happens. The poetry project could ever be in the space.

A Poem Book a Week #2 AREA--marcella durand

Something special about a book when it is given as a gift from a publisher--here this one is a favorite.

What I have in response are the marks of active reading:

The same story cut up and arranged into a different pattern of shards.
It torches like an idea or a dream.
We may contain plastic, but we are not of it.
Acrylic doesn't breath and can be
transported into space. It holds color
and doesn't let anyone in. 
Invisibility forms buoyancy.
While in the rippling seven bands luminous and ephemeral, the landscape features may fracture or appear to fracture in the viewpoint of computer-generated hue.
And you rub your eyes thinking such shades could never be. They could never appear except transfused through wire and socket, cord, outlet, oil, coal, and a little water and wind.
One is overlaid over the other, or one came first, but which is linear and what expands in crumbling starfish shape? Tonight, the light over the chemical plants is exquisite. Long factory shadows spread over the invasive fountain grasses, pale beige heads nodding over the shallow waters.

We are going to stop here on page twenty-seven as memory of an idea hits. What I value most from AREA as an entry point is the poem "Scale Shift" which is about the relationship between time, place, and color. For instance, if you live in the northeast in the first decades of the third millennium, then each season (winter, spring, summer, fall) has its own set of colors. But then there is an argument that the human relationship to earth does damage to the processes of the earth and desire: were humans not industrializing and digitizing. And, so what durand helps us to see (if you can forgive the pun) is that the visual representation of that damage is in the loss of color in our geographies--urban landscapes, but also dystopic desserts. She doesn't leave us with color as only earth, but also color as skin. So my take-away in the middle of reading a challenging text is an argument for the importance of diversity of colors... so it's a useful book if you want to think along lines of racial and ecological justice... circles... areas...

The poem that then opens up some of durand's brilliance as wordsmith for then going back to access perspectives throughout the book (as Donna Masini says, a poet teaches you how to read them) is the first prose poem in "The Verneuil Process." It starts off with sky and clouds, then moves to bay, and then ocean. There is a description of the process of seeing ("It takes opacity to capture light") and then an eye. As a reader the first time, I think it is a human eye. But then we get noise of a "passing giant crushing turbine" and a "flapping" turns to "thrashing" and "light fracturing along tissue," and the eye that seemed disembodied as only eye, becomes eye that is part of a fish suddenly being caught by a giant commercial fishing boat. Because the plot of the poem occurs through descriptions of kinetic and sonic imagery, the reader is absorbed into the story to empathize with fish and what durand imagines it feels like to be the horror for a fish being caught by commercial boat.

So my take-away here is to as I read be more thoughtful about point-of-view and how imagery might be creating narrative.