I’m sick of worrying about my houseplants and my haircut, let’s refresh ourselves.
What’s the tastiest poetry reading you ever heard?– a real meal-in-itself or room-perfumer?
When poets I love can’t communicate their work by voice– when E.E. Cummings turns his poems into Sunday work, or John Ashbery turns his poems into refrigerator-buzz– I try not to get heartbroken. There’s always people-watching: at dull readings of a certain class and age, listeners twirl their winestems, cross their legs tight above the knee, inhale faintly after the poem is done as if to say, yes– yes, that’s the grandfather clock I want exactly. At another class and age, people discreetly pocket their iPhones or set down cheap pints long enough to whoop after their friend onstage shares.
This is fun to see in its own way. But I don’t want to talk about readings I don’t like: I want to talk about snacks! Here are some poets to wolf down, in the dining halls of your heart and mind.
Mark Leidner first read his animated, uncanny, best-friend’s-dreams poems to me in a fearful psycho monotone– I try to imagine what air conditioners would say if they had mouths and minds of their own–, and Catherine Wagner sings and garbles words like a winged preschooler.
David Antin, damn him, chooses titles and makes talk-poems– about furniture shopping, philosophy, silence– up completely on the spot. Ish Klein, the Batman of contemporary poets/experimental filmmakers, writes poems like “I’m Amazing, I’m a Fireman” and reads them even better than you’d think a poem with such a great title could be read.
Nobody but Ilya Kaminsky scores their page likewise for rush and rephrasing and coo and outcry, almost incomprehensible without text (as gets supplied) alongside. Anne Waldman plays her piano while she reads!
I once saw Olena Kalytiak Davis mortify a room full of squares by starting her reading with someone else’s poem about despising readings (what a moment! alas I only have text). Whereas Dorothea Lasky gets on the mic and just articulately shouts.
There’s an argument here– something about non-normative skull-clearing performance, refreshment and exhilaration– but arguments aren’t interesting. Poetry is interesting.