Alex Dimitrov and Marie Howe Reading

I attended a reading at the Lillion Vernon Creative Writer’s House with Alex Dimitrov and Marie Howe. Dimitrov is a young, new writer who attended NYU a d studied under the more distinguished Howe. She served as his mentor.

The reading celebrated the release of Dimitrov’s new book of poetry, “Begging For It,” which Dimitrov said came from living in “an America in which we sell ourselves,” which I found very evocative. Dimitrov’s poetry felt very self-indulgent. His language was very frank, and much of his work was inspired by his personal experiences. He referenced Facebook and the “Like” button in one poem, and playing his poem “on repeat” in another, which gave them a very young, current vibe. His introducer described them as “easy to describe as shameless, but more accurately depicted as without shame,” another statement which stuck with me as Dimitrov read. He writes about sex, homosexuality, rejection and poetry bluntly. He speaks to the reader a lot, and refers in his poetry to “this poem” (“This poem is concerned with language on a simple level,” one of them read). While I appreciate Dimitrov’s making poetry very much about the world that we are currently living in, I didn’t find that his poems quite got there for me personally. I didn’t really connect with them.

Marie Howe was not what I had been expecting. We all discussed her abundant mane of hair, which seemed to take up more of the podium than she did. She spoke for a few minutes before she read, and spoke philosophically with her authority over all us aspiring writers: “making poems is a worthless act, and therefore priceless, because it somehow cannot be bought.” Howe’s poems were very different from Dimitrov’s, more elegant and feminine—she wrote about her brother who died of AIDS in 1989 and about historical religious figures, of which she said, “they were the archetypal characters I grew up with.” This didn’t seem to connect with many of the young people there, which was interesting. It just seemed to show how much things have changed in terms of religion, how it factors into our lives and the choices that we have the ability to make about how it does.