Fatefully

Though it wasn’t an actual poetry-reading event, my good friend Hunter had told me he was planning to read some poems at the Monday night Open Mic at Sidewalk Café somewhere in the Village (or was it Alphabet City). I had shown him my other good friend Ilana’s poetry project, which consisted of a poem a day for 365 days (and can be found at ilipowiczdaily.blogspot.com/), and he decided to read them for the open mic. At that point, I was already familiar with Ilana’s poems. I had also been familiar with how Ilana’s poems sound out loud because I had read them out loud before. However, the most interesting part about Hunter’s performance was how differently he chose to approach each poem. I actually had a copy of the poems he was going to read, and I noticed that there were so many different gimmicks in his reading (pauses, breaths, gulps, sighs, accents, dynamics) that were so far from mine when I had read in the comfort of my own home. Another powerful part of Hunter’s performance was his constant exchange with the audience. He was always looking up, looking around, furrowing his eyebrows, giggling, and deeply sighing, ultimately seeming like he was speaking to the audience. This was an important thing to note in my case. I am trying to improve my ability to recite poems and simply trying to do it more. Hunter was a great inspiration that night, and that night was a great inspiration for all. 

One fine Monday evening

One fine Monday evening, I happened to drop in at the ol’ KGB Bar on 4^th street for some sick Monday night poetry. The poets that night happened to be two fine, well-groomed gentlemen, Louis Jenkins and Glyn Maxwell. Unfortunately, I had not paid sufficient attention to Louis’ readings because I had the fortunate opportunity to talk to a handsome young lady named Jeannette. However, I was fully attentive when Glyn Maxwell approached the stage, and to my excitement, he quenched my desire for artistic fulfillment for the night. Maxwell’s voice is low and sounds like an old church. It also reminds me of the voice of Bane from the latest addition to the Batman franchise. The poem that I recall most clearly out of his selection was titled “The Boys at Twilight,” which was breathtakingly captivating. To my memory, the most enjoyable part of the poem and his recitation was his constancy. I love when poems are under the control of a set number of syllables per line, set number of lines per stanza, and perhaps a rhyme scheme, but still have so much going on in between the lines. I remember sitting there and being completely under the control of his voice and the words forced from his mouth. I actually left right after that poem because I wanted to retain that spiritual high. I’m looking up the poem now, and it’s just as good as I remembered it to be.  

A fateful Thursday afternoon

After class one fine Thursday afternoon, Robin and I were taking a stroll while discussing game theory when we happened upon the Lillian Vernon Creative Writing House. Fatefully, there was a poetry reading that day from a number of authors. We had the privilege to sit in for Mark Doty’s reading of poems from one of his books, titled Deep Lane. According to Doty, Deep Lane is named after a certain street near his Long Island home. Due to the fact that Robin and I were forced to sit literally two rooms away from Doty, I was not able to listen carefully until a few pieces into his reading. However, one poem that caught my intention was the poem titled “Ghost” in which he describes the eerie spirit of his family one afternoon in his kitchen. Before beginning the recitation, Doty claimed that he and his father had not spoken during the last few five years of his father’s life, which proved to set me in the right emotional mood for the poem. Though the exact words do not come to me at this moment, I do remember the physical alterations in Doty’s reading as the poem began to reach its more poignant moments. I think that what struck me so strongly about “Ghost” was how Doty kept his head down throughout the entire reading while in other poems he would come up for a momentary breath of air and a look at the crowd. I wonder why poems are not performed just as frequently as they are read. 

Nox in a Box

Though I hate to say it like this, Nox by Anne Carson seems, to me, to be the closest thing to a work of art of all the books we have read this semester. First of all, it physically transcends the ordinary format of a typical book of poems being words on pages bound together. As it includes numerous sketches, photographs, and other crucial memorabilia, Nox reminds its audience that sometimes the experience that one seeks to capture within a poem surpasses the poem itself and must be expressed in other various media. The physical book itself isn’t even really a book; it has been reproduced and distributed in a box as a continuation of pages that opens up accordion-style, which proves to be one of its most admirable features. It takes up space. It gets in people’s way. It is a burden. I think that Anne Carson expects the reader to take up the tedious activity of reserving an empty hallway or corridor and actually open the entire “book” to its full length. What would result is a timeline of someone’s life with that someone being Anne Carson’s brother who unexpectedly passed away without her knowing for two weeks. With that said, Anne Carson is able to do successfully what she set out to do by writing and publishing this book, which is to pay homage to her brother.

However, what is important to note is that Nox is not just a collection of old memories of someone. Anne Carson did not simply compile things that reminded her of her brother. She actively thought and toiled to create this piece of art in such a way that she thought would resemble her brother. This came to me when I read the New Yorker’s review of her book. At one point in the article, it is revealed that in order to produce the first page of the book, which has a yellowish tinge and is slightly blurred, Carson actually took the time to soak her typescript of the poem in tea overnight. Apparently, Nox is an active piece of work. By simply looking at what it looks like, one can tell that Carson worked hard to produce the actual book. That gives me the idea that in addition to being a finish product that would reach the public eye, Nox was also an experience for Carson herself. While scrolling through each page, one can get the feeling of Carson reminiscing about her brother, who was a rather troubled youth and ran away from home at an early age. Furthermore, the reader can also feel Carson mourning the loss of her brother as well as coping with the dead and trying to make sense of everything. At times, she seems to be in control of the work she is producing: everything is deliberate and well designed. However, at other times, the work transcends Carson’s control, and the reader can feel those momentary breaks when she might stop and reach for a tissue. 

Blue Colonial: :Colonial Blue

            I wasn’t able to obtain a copy of David Roderick’s Blue Colonial, but I came across the title poem online somewhere. At first glance, I was immediately skeptical that I would enjoy this poem. As I’ve been writing more and reading more poetry, I’ve been beginning to realize what kind of poems appeal to me, which are those that retain a constant stanza structure and have very few words. Though “Blue Colonial” is good on the first criterion, I was reluctant to keep reading once I saw the poem because of how lengthy it was. As I continued reading, it felt more like a short story with some weird little bits rather than an actual poem. However, Roderick was able to capture my attention and respect towards the halfway mark of the poem when he reminisces about the incident at Billington Lake: “This was near Billington Lake, where a girl once plunged through the ice. She'd been trapped for hours before her body was pulled from its frozen zone. When her brain thawed, she told about a vision she had, how everything she touched, living or dead, spun into a string of light.” This is the only part of the poem that I like besides the last line, “I remember the trees by their shadows.” The section about Billington Lake utilizes proper prose, but there is something insanely beautiful about it. So, I went and looked up another one of Roderick’s works, only to realize that “Blue Colonial” is actually not representative of his style as a poet. With that in mind, I think that “Blue Colonial” is effective in its purpose, which is to recall all of the adventures and so-called “catastrophes” that Roderick had as a child. His poem resembles the way one might reminisce about his or her childhood, thinking “Oh, that happened. Oh, and that. We did that over there” and on and on. His poem also completes a second purpose, which is to pay homage to this “Blue Colonial” that he seems to “keep [him] frozen.”  

            I think one of Roderick’s strongest points as a poet is his ability to create certain metaphors that are very poignant, but still make sense. Take these phrases for instance: “monotonous shingles,” “carboniferous smell,” or “temporary flowers.” Each of these phrases seem like they are one of a kind, but they aren’t at all confusing. It would be inappropriate to say that this applies to all of Roderick’s writing, but he doesn’t seem like he would ever put two different distinct images together to create a semi-obscure metaphor, like “two-eyed door knob.”

            All in all, I’m glad that I happened upon or was assigned this poem because it has allowed me to digress from more traditional forms of poetry to more prose poetry style. “Blue Colonial” is a good midway point between short story and poetry, and I think it’ll also help my short stories to sound a little more poetic. 

Nets

To be honest, reading Nets was an intimidating experience because I often approach works of erasure warily. They scare me. Though I’ve never seriously attempted erasure, I don’t think I would be good at them. As a result of my fear, I tend to put myself in the mind of the reader and pinpoint how he or she might have arrived at the final product from the original piece, usually to no avail. However, now that I think about it, I think what fascinates me most about erasure poems is that they highly resemble psychology experiments. In the same way that an experiment director might place certain ambiguous images in front of you and ask you what you think, an erasure poem tracks the way you process certain selections of words and arrangements. In that sense, the production of erasure poems can seem extremely arbitrary, but are in fact somewhat systematic and depend on brain wiring and whatnot.

Concerning Nets, the issue of deciphering the erasure poem is exacerbated due to the fact that the original source is William Shakespeare’s sonnets, which are incredibly lush and potent with emotion and imagery. Consider  #63. In the original sonnet, Shakespeare utilizes such powerful diction, including words like “injurious,” “drained,” “youthful,” “confounding,” or even “knife.” However, Bervin selects only nine words from the sonnet to produce a concise, but equally evocative poem: “I am vanishing or vanished in these black lines.” Another example is poem #137, which is simply a single word, “anchored.” The way in which Bervin seems to draw each word so meticulously varies throughout the entire collection, but each poem tells a different story in its own individual style.

            As works directly derived from other works, erasure poems, such as in Nets where the original source is provided, intrinsically includes the dimension of space. In other words, the poems are not presented in some four-line stanza, but are splayed out throughout the page. In that way, the poems are not only about the words themselves, but how they are arranged and how they exist in space. With that in mind, it is interesting reading Bervin’s Working Note at the end of the book where she writes, “I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible --- a diverge elsewhere.” I think she uses her ability to alter the space dimensions of the poem to make her point concerning the relationship between poems and history. Bervin continues, “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us…when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” In her words, Shakespeare’s sonnets are the canvas for the erasure poems to come. The canvas provides the history and the context in the back of the mind while the poet is able to create his own poem out of that. Nets was actually my favorite book of poetry that we read as a class, and I expect to read more books of Bervin’s.