Wooly Bully? Hurly Behrle!
You may have noticed that MiPOradio is now listed to the left as a Silliman Site, just two up from PENNsound. MiPO’s Didi Menendez swears that listening to poetry on podcasts & iTunes is going to be the next big thing, if it isn’t that already. I don’t know, but her rap on this echoes Charles Bernstein’s about the importance, for example, of recording every poem by every poet in some kind of easily searchable order (and just possibly multiple readings of the same poems by the same author, so that, presumably, we can tell if the difference between readings tells us anything about the author or the poem itself, other than that maybe one’s eyes weaken with age & that a lot of venues could use a little more light on the podium, thank you).
I’m a lot less certain. I have said (and written) before that I think that what survives in poetry – what really is the poem – is almost invariably platform independent. The physical limitations of Vispo, for example, are not so different from the same limitations that pertain to the body & voice of the poet. Yes, it’s interesting to hear Olson’s breathless rush through his longer poems or to notice that Zukofsky pauses at the end of every second linebreak, so that one functions as a kind of caesura & the other as a “true” break, but while that may tell me something about their relationship to their poems, it doesn’t always tell me about my relationship to those same texts. Which frankly is what matters. To me.
Jim Behrle recorded portions of my reading with David Shapiro as part of the Jim Behrle Show, a relatively fugitive effort that you can view (or even download) here. Once you sort of conceptually peel off Jim’s overly energetic mode of hosting (and you thought Conan O’Brien was servile!?!), Jim actually does a good job of capturing the feel of the event at the Bowery Poetry Club. I would go so far as to recommend this to anyone whose only exposure to poetry readings is through those deadly little state college reading series where everyone sits silently absorbing the text. Those are readings rather in the same way that those ashes in an urn are your grandmother. Jim has done a good job representing how a reading looks & feels when a poet is any part of a community – my own relationship to New York is fairly distant, having not spent a full week there in one continuous period since 1964. Hint: it’s not silent, rapt attention. And there is laughter.
One difference that may separate Behrle from Menendez & Bernstein, tho, is archival. Jim has done a number of these shows, with writers of quite different aesthetics. It would be great to see them all hosted for long-term retrieval at some site that enabled a potential viewer to distinguish the Sillimans from the Mark Strands.
