I don’t get most poetry. I get some, mostly the classics, the short ones anyway. But long rambling dry-as-dust elegiac reflections in churchyards and modern free verse usually have me mentally wandering off before I get past the first few stanzas.
Lately, I’ve been reading poetry to Nan’s mother, Barbara, when we go to visit her at Parc Provence. The shorter poems keep her attention; she laughs at some of the amusing ones and seems moved by some of the profound ones. I’ve been reading from old English Lit textbooks dating mostly from my father’s high school days, so I haven’t read anything to her written since WWII.
Saturday night we went to the Official Grand Opening of our neighborhood Left Bank bookstore. The featured evening event was a poetry reading. It was interesting to try modern poetry again, much as I used to try liver every few years. I eventually gave up on liver.
My Persona de Event, Santa Garcia, ur-freak and retro-bohemian.
We heard a half-dozen Left Bank staffers read their poetry to warm the crowd up for the main event, a reading by D. A. Powell. Powell is a famous published and award-winning poet I’d never heard of. To be fair, most of the poets I’ve ever heard of are dead.
The staffers were a varied lot and I appreciate their willingness to share their innermost thoughts and feelings and admire the courage it took to bare their souls. Only one staff reader ellicited an emotional response from me, a young woman reading erotic poetry. It wasn’t the eroticism I responded to. Really! (I think.) It was the joy and passion she projected as she read her poems. She could have been speaking in an unfamiliar language and she still would have succeeded in making her listeners react.
Powell’s reading was dramatic and memorable, though it represented the exact opposite approach. He read in a very deliberate, quiet, and syncopated cadenced voice. I can still hear it in my head days later. The young woman’s style, and, particularly, Powell’s style, went a long way to confirm my belief that, in modern free verse, delivery is as important, sometimes more important, than content.
“I fear my mucus: its endless volume and amorphous shape
a demon expelling from my lips.”
from [my riches I have squandered. spread with honey] by D. A. Powell
When you’re reading phrases like, “I fear my mucus,” your delivery had better evoke something in the audience other than snorts of derision. Earlier in this poem, Powell uses exsiccated when he could have used desiccated. Nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand are, like me, going to come to a screeching mental halt when they hear “exsiccated.” He’s trying to be deliberately inaccessible. And succeeding. But you could hear a pin drop while he was reading. When I re-read his poetry now, I hear his voice.
A lot (not all) of the free verse I heard Saturday night reminded me of wordwooze, colorful words and snippets of phrase strung together to produce what sounded like meaningless white noise. The poems surely meant something profound to their authors, but if I, the listener/reader, don’t hear a message, or perceive an image, or experience an emotion without needing to have it explained, it comes across to me as wordwooze.
Powell demonstrated that you can make even wordwooze move an audience if your delivery is memorable.
If any of the Left Bank Poets read these words because they’ve followed Google here, pay no attention to the ramblings of a sometimes reactionary old man who’s trying to understand himself and his responses to art. Follow your muse!
But work on your delivery!
Advance Uncorrected Proofs
And then we got to pillage a table of books. These were advance reader copies Left Bank was giving away to its Friends (and Nan and I are Friends). You got to fill up a canvas tote (also a gift) with anything you wanted from the table. Most of the books were identified as “advance uncorrected proofs.” Some didn’t have cover art yet, just statistics about the book on a Kinko’s-type binding. One was bound from right-to-left, with page one being the last page of the book and page 253 being the first page.
We showed restraint and only half-filled the bag.
I read some discussion on the Internet concerning the value of these odd books with their errors and strange bindings. People in the know take the position that, unless they are signed by the author, or stained by the author’s tears, they’re worth less than a regular copy because (duh) they contain errors. People probably thought the same thing about the Inverted Jenny. Now they’re worth $300,000 a pop. Heh!
Big fun.
- Poppa
I love reading your ramblings. Keep ‘em coming!