Poetry Night

Last evening after a long day at work, mainly on the internet consuming utterly useless information, I went to a poetry reading organized by a friendly aquintance of mine, Elaine. It's been a long time since I have been a room with other consenting adults listening to other consenting adults reading their poem. It was wierd. I am being honest here, because I am finding that blogging is this wierd marriage of journalling and performing. Plus,I just read this delicious and profound and hilarious play/book by the late Spalding Grey called "Swimming to Cambodia" and his unflagging honesty was fucking brilliant and bold and hilarious. So, I am taking a page from Spalding's book and just saying whatever the hell I want (on the net, that is).

So, poetry night. Have you ever noticed how so much of perception is based on context? I know, I know that is almost pathetically "stating the obvious" but I really noticed it last night. Suddenly, because it was a poetry reading all the men there seemed a little...fey or super crunchy (GRANOLA) ish. They all seemed to be wearing earthtones and I counted a lot of khaki pants and more than a few patagonia jackets. The women all seemed crazy kind of like Sylvia Plath (without the mythology or Ted Hughes or Gwyneth Paltrow movie) I must have looked crazy too. Everyone there seemed to have graduated from the University of Michigan or the University of Wisconsin, Madison and I got the feeling that they all ride bicycles on the weekend and prefer foreign films. It all felt a little...staid.

The poems and the readers (there were two) were fine and, when I wasn't thinking about whether or not I should eat dinner or just skip it and have a big breakfast tomorrow instead, some of the poems were catchy. A lot of modern poetry suffers from what the rest of modern art suffers from: the inability to take the individual experience and make it grander and more universal and more fantastic than just the outpouring of psycho-babble. So, there was a lot of lines about "in our apartment when the sun was shining and burnishing your skin and you were incased in glass. Remember your fathers stripped sweater and pipe which litter the road to the canyon that we looked out onto." One quickly tires of description followed by adjective followed by description: all allusions to the storminess of the writer's childhood or love life. Hardly any of it rhymes either which if I am going to be completely candid, a la Spalding Grey, I have to admit bugs me.

I love poetry though and I wish it weren't relegated to crazy-Aunt-in-the-attic status. When you go into a bookstore, the poetry section is usually banished to a corner like the porno videos at Blockbuster - just out of sight, a dirty little fetish meant only for adults. I was always particularly taken with the Romantics - Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake and their crazy love of nature, and their crazy love of love, and their love of revolutionary enlightnment and their love of enlightning drugs - the rock stars of the 1800's. I wished, at times, last night there could have been shots of absinthe and wild runs between overgrown hedges with poems being recited in between the fields of untamed grass but, uh, there was no absinthe just complimentary shots of Bailey's Irish Cream in Dixie cups and no grass except for the kind being sold outside the nearby soup kitchen on the corner of 40th and 9th.

So, here 's to poetry of the yesteryear: to words more fierce, more dear, more bold, more clear. Here's to you, Mr. Blake, up in heaven, drinking all of God's wine,
Now a ghost still writing poems, wild, whimsical, and, divine.

Laughing Song by William Blake

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing 'Ha ha he!'
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of 'Ha ha he!'