Rod Smith

 

I was shocked when the Robert Creeley reading – one might even call it the Robert Creeley evening – ended on the CD that accompanies the latest issue of Kiosk. It is one of the fastest, most completely engrossing 51 minutes I’ve ever spent listening to anything, and I was nowhere near ready for it to end.

Then, the next day, the next CD that went into the player was Rod Smith’s Fear the Sky, at just under 71 minutes a full length recording with production values that would make an indie band weep with envy. Smith is the perfect poet for such a project, as he has the most active ear of any writer of his generation & he’s a great – if decidedly deadpan – reader of his own work. Listening to this recording feels like it takes 20 minutes & one is totally engrossed the entire time, as Smith demonstrates a range of affect far wider than I’ve heard from him before, all the way from the devastatingly ironic, more or less his signature move, to the utterly straightforward (commenting on the death of his son). If Smith’s recording doesn’t feel as warm as the Creeley, it’s only because Fear the Sky is, in fact, a studio event, where one feels Creeley’s give & take with a live audience.

Back to back, so to speak, the two recordings reminded me of one of the basic truths about poetry – the one-hour reading, or something relatively close to it, is always preferable to the 20 minute one. As an experience, the differences between the two are not unlike the differences between the major motion picture and a 30-minute sitcom on TV.

I’ve often been amazed at how brief public readings are in most cities – three poets in less than one hour is not impossible & it’s rare for three to go over 90 minutes. One feels at times as if the audience can’t wait for the reading to end so that everybody can rush to the bar & spend the next two hours drinking & gossiping. I don’t object to the drinking & gossiping part – they have their place – at least so long as I can get a club soda or mineral water. But there have certainly been readings where I’ve felt that the event was little more than a formal excuse for the partying afterward.

How you hear a poem & how you hear a reading are two different things, unless of course the reading consists of a single long text (which may be why I’ve given so many readings that have been just that). Some of the tracks on Smith’s CD are as short as 23 seconds. They echo in the mind, but by the time one absorbs the words, the poem itself is long gone. (This may explain why such diverse poets as Robert Bly & Bob Grenier have a tendency to read a short poem multiple times during a reading.) With a longer reading, on the other hand, the reader settles in, begins to hear nuances & themes, tonal changes, as well as whatever content might be flowing past. With a longer reading, you can almost hear the moment at which the audience relaxes into the text – it always occurs somewhere after the 15-minute mark, sometimes after the 30 (and, often, you’ll hear two such moments). At 40 moments or thereabouts, I’m so tuned into a reader’s sense of time & the formal scope of the text that it is as if a vista opened up. Only from that point forward can I really hear pretty much everything the poet is doing.

And no two poets, at least no two decent ones, have anything like the same timing – it’s as particular as fingerprints. If I find that I resonate with some aspect of that timing, a reading can act like a spell – I’m totally enveloped. But if I find that I don’t resonate, sometimes the reading itself can seem very alien, as if we’re translating across not just languages but beings or species. That can be even more interesting if I can tell that the writing is very good, but operating on planes that don’t feel at all familiar or intuitive to me. Indeed, some of the readings that have had the most lasting impression on me – Alice Notely as well as the late Douglas Oliver – fall into exactly this category.

The lone advantage then that I often find reading in a college setting is that so many university readings are solo affairs in which one has the opportunity to “go long” if one wants. But I wish more reading series in cities followed suit, or else proposed something akin to “two poets, two hours” as their stated model, like the grand old double-bills we used to take in at the Times Theater in the Chinatown of my youth.