Impressions of the first evening’s reading from The Philly Sound fest at La Tazza 108:

 

¨       Starting an hour late works well from the perspective of getting through the horrific traffic, a combination of normal Friday Philadelphia traffic hell plus a Bruce Springsteen concert. At the announced starting time, I’m still trying to make my way down to Chestnut Street & have been traveling for 90 minutes to go just 20 miles. But when I finally get to La Tazza at 7:10, there are only six or seven people there. By 8:00, there are 60 and the number keeps growing during the evening. Afterwards, Tom Devaney tells me he counted over 100 in attendance.

¨       Patrick Scanlon has smartly commandeered the Pac-Man machine from which to sell books. I buy Uneveness & The Blood Sonnets by Juliana Spahr & Cut and Shoot, a collaboration by Cathleen Miller & Deborah Richards. I put copies of Secret Swan #14 on the machine to be given out for free. And I wonder if Juliana knows that unevenness is misspelled.

¨       I see Herman Beavers at a table going through a manuscript. Tom Devaney told me earlier in the day that he hoped to induce Beavers to read & I realize now he’s been successful.

¨       On the flip side, Tom shows up to tell me that John Godfrey was unable to get off work in time to make tonight’s reading. I’ve always wanted to read with Godfrey, so this is a major disappointment, especially since I know already that I won’t be able to attend Saturday.

¨       A man comes up to me & introduces himself as CA Conrad. Other than the mysterious Invisible Adjunct, Conrad is the only other member of the Philadelphia community to take serious advantage of the weblog form. We’ve corresponded via email for months, but never formally met. You can find Craig in this photo, in the back row with his hand on his brow. My travels this summer have convinced me that it’s a serious disadvantage to a scene not to have a solid cluster of poetry bloggers. NY, SF & Boston seem to have gotten it done. San Diego, Washington & Philadelphia all have some catching up to do. [Note to self: think out a regionalism & blogging piece.]

¨       I see several old friends as the reading starts to gather: Kristen Gallagher in town from Buffalo, John Krick with whom I used to work at TSS, Daniel Abd al-Hayy Moore (whom I warn I will misconstrue in my reading, which I later do), possibly the only person in the room who is older than I. I see several of the event’s organizers – Mytili Jagannathan, Frank Sherlock, Magdalena Zurawski (who announces that [1] she is passing up a free ticket to the Springsteen concert to be here and [2] she will be moving to San Francisco shortly). Jules Bykoff comes up to say hello. As does Hassan. As does Prageeta Sharma. So does (tho this is later) Kazim Ali & (later still) Barbara Cole. Someday says that Eileen Myles is coming straight from the airport, but if she made it to the reading I didn’t see here.

¨       At some point, Devaney asks if Eddie Berrigan has arrived &, as if conjured by his name, he’s standing immediately behind Tom. So the event gets under way. Tom & Maggie (nee Magdalena) share the introductions. And Edmund goes first, reading a long dialog entailing multiple entities of dubious ontology: Tepid, Ball, Melty, Science Students, Hallelujah. The work has an urban feel to it, with large doses of humor, but I would hesitate to characterize it as fiction. Rather, Berrigan seems to be finding a space that operates between poetry, theater & fiction without ever being any one of the three. It’s an interesting balancing act & it immediately calls to mind other poets (Nada Gordan, Jen Hofer) who I sometimes think are aiming for this same space beyond genre.

¨       Next up is Beavers, which makes for an amazing contrast. Beavers is every bit as much about genre as Berrigan seems to be about dissolving it. An African-American academic on the high side of 40, Beavers’ poetry mostly employs dramatic monolog combined with black dialect to articulate a space that sounds a little like Al Young with all of the New American allusions of Young’s work drained away. Beavers’ work is technically competent, funny & smart. But it sounds very much like an example of a generation of writing that has already been thoroughly framed by history. I’m most interested in his last works, which are prose poems & a failed (in Beavers’ term) sestina, though they don’t sound different from the earlier pieces.

¨       At the break, Jena Osman asks me how long I intend to read. We’ve all been instructed to do 15 minute sets. Beavers’ reading ran 25, which was still modest compared with Berrigan’s 40. We can already see the Goth band that will soon be playing in the basement rock club carting their instruments & electronics downstairs. “You mean, how long is 15 minutes in my world,” I ask.

¨       I find it hard-to-impossible at readings where I’m on the agenda to really focus & this gets worse the closer I get to my own turn. So it’s really a comment as to how strong a reader & writer Osman is that she breaks through my increasingly self-contained shell. She reads two pieces – actually staying well within the 15 minute mark – one that I think is called “Bowdlerizer,” then a second longer work entitled “The Novel of Nowhere,” a piece inspired, Osman says, by Colin Powell’s comment that “war is not inevitable.” There is a figure named Bosch, although it is never clear whether it is the Gothic painter or the ousted Dominican president who Osman has in mind. This piece is brilliant, exceptionally moving & over far too soon.

¨       I read a version of the same excerpts from VOG that I did at the Drawing Center in New York in June & at 21 Grand in Oakland in July, adding one new piece, “Of Grammatology” – it’s been one that I’ve been undecided on & had even been thinking of excising from VOG, but when I was contemplating that fate this past week, I decided that I liked it & that the long “found” sentence in the middle of such a short prose piece gave it a structure that engaged me – while subtracting several others. As I read, I struggle with the lack of a podium – it takes me forever to get one page out of my hand & onto the table to my side, so that every multipage piece feels disrupted to me as there is an exaggerated stanza between every page. The audience is quieter, more somber & with less laughter, than either of those in NY or Oakland, though I get an enthusiastic round of applause when I’m done. The reading makes me feel grumpy, as if I could see where I wanted to go with it, but with the text always remaining slightly out of focus.

¨       As he’s leaving (and I’m preparing to), Beavers comes up to me to tell me that my reading was “edgy.” I’m still pondering what that might mean.

¨       Afterwards, I’m driving Krick back to where his own car was parked & he comments that we were the oldest people in the room. This isn’t, strictly speaking, accurate – Abd al-Hayy has a couple of years on me – but it’s close enough. Out of a 100 people, there were maybe 98 who were younger. This makes me contemplate the sometimes problematic continuity of American poetry. This in turn reminds me of one reader’s comment to one of the sillier Quizmo games – Which Michael Palmer book are you? – which was “Who is Michael Palmer?”