Featured Readings
Chris Alexander

With the advent of cheap, high-quality recording equipment (once magnetic tape, now mostly mini-disc), the form of the poetry reading developed during the New American Poetry has received increasing attention, both in terms of poetics/scholarship and the proliferation of audio archives, especially online. Poets now in their 20s & 30s, in keeping with the abundance of recordings & home movies (8mm, video) that have gracefully cluttered & even, in some degree, become our memories of childhood - not to mention the ever more intense & increasing accepted expressions of a public will to surveil & the attitude of informal self-surveillance that has become a primary feature of the life & character of the U.S., our adulthood - are more recorded than the working poets of any previous generation. The change has not, for us, been apocalyptic; which is not to say it has been unconscious. More than once I've been party to conversations around the topic of digital recording and what Peter Quartermain has called the "archaeological fallacy" - the notion of the poet's voice as the root of authenticity, an anachronism that misses not only of the performative nature of human sociality, but even the performative nature of performance. I've been at readings where as many as 3 recording devices were present, redundantly operative - distributed copies of readings to those in attendance - even compared my own recording of an event with recordings made by friends. The preponderance of this sort of activity has made us, as poets, increasingly attuned to the possibilities of recording & broadcast technology; which is not perhaps a generational break - given the precedents, e.g., of Susan Howe's WBAI radio show, Charles Bernstein's impressive cassette archive - but generationally a wider & more prominent awareness. From here, one can even imagine a moment in which Lyn Hejinian's well-known comment on publishing as an extension of one's writing practice could be restated with reference to recording styles and methods of broadcast, distribution - acts in one sense more basic than literary publishing, that they represent & effectuate a "scene" more immediately than does the single-author chapbook or even the little magazine: the noise is palpable beyond the sound. But that development awaits some future poets, born of a soundscape I'm not likely ever to meet.

"Wasn't there some public channel coverage about . . . ?" "That's right," Sam said, "It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the moon." (Sam Delany, TRITON)

I've chosen these readings from the personal archives at my disposal, mostly my own. And I've chosen these readings for a variety of reasons: because they represent work that I particularly want to support; because they mark especially intense moments in the life of the Buffalo Poetics community as I've known it. The concentration of poets in Buffalo has meant that many, often simultaneous reading series have taken place during my time here; some - for instance, the Last Friday series hosted by Linda Russo & myself in 1998 & 1999, the readings at Anya Lewin's fabulous CORNERSHOP - have gone entirely unrecorded. Where recordings exist, I've made no attempt to present them exhaustively. In particular, while I am extremely grateful for the official Wednesdays@4 readings (some of which have been included here), in my opinion the most interesting series have been those unaffiliated or barely affiliated with the university: the quasi-public but altogether informal readings taking place in living rooms, art studios, backyards, the back room of Rust Belt Books on Allen St. - in "secret locations" not very secret but very much our own.

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Another Buffalo Reading Series, 8 February 2002
Nathan Austin reads from GLOST at Gordon Hadfield & Sasha Steensen's old Elmwood Ave. apartment; intro ad-libbed beautifully by Kristen Gallagher.
[stream] [download] 20:53

Another Buffalo Reading Series, 8 March 2002
Kristen Gallagher reads from her grain elevators project at Thom Donovan & Gracey Cox's old place on Edward St. in downtown Buffalo; intro by Thom Donovan.
The reading was accompanied by a slide show of photos taken at the grain elevators.
[stream] [download] 36:35

[no associated series], 21 March 2003
Matthias Reagan reads CODE BOOK CODE at Rust Belt Books in Allentown (Buffalo); intro by Chris Alexander.
[stream] [download] 18:03
During the second half of the evening, with just a few people hanging out, Matthias and I took turns reading from his chapbook UTILITY: RHETORIC & LECTURES, with commentary and chat interspersed.
[stream] [download] 41:33

Another Buffalo Reading Series, 9 November 2001
Linda Russo reads from work in progress at Barbara Cole & Gregg Biglieri's old apartment on Ashland Avenue; intro by Greg Kinzer, including some comic moments when first Greg & then Linda can't be found.
[stream] [download] 27:58