Jeffrey and others,
I love the idea of figuring out—in part as a way of exploring what invisible or less visible lines connect us—where our sensibilities overlap and which poets we all hold dear. Harryette Mullen is a damn good choice! Who else? David Antin?
This raises the question of whether the poets we might have in common are “crossover” poets (and what that would mean) or whether we all have somewhat eclectic tastes and are bound to overlap somewhere.
And, Jeffrey, since you asked, the secret to my slam success is this: always read a poem with at least one blowjob in it. Perhaps that makes me a whore: I did win over $40 of slam money with those blowjob poems. Unfortunately, I also attracted a few local fans. At the end of my senior year I did a very Ivory Tower reading hosted by one of Yale’s residential colleges. I read with a talented, soft-spoken, frightened-looking undergrad named Carrie Iverson (where is she now?). In the middle of Carrie’s reading one of my slam fans, a man in his fifties with a gravelly voice so low in pitch it seemed to cause him to stammer, showed up. I’d never seen him outside the Daily Café (which used to be on the corner of Park and Elm and was where the smaller slams were held). This man (I remember his name but won’t use it here) stood up in the middle of Carrie’s reading, walked behind her, and started stamping and dragging his foot along the floor in the back corner of the room. Carrie continued reading but haltingly, looking up uneasily every few seconds. Indeed, everyone was uneasy, and no one knew what to do. After a few minutes of stomping and muttering, my fan turned toward the audience and said, rather proudly, “did you see that?” He looked around dramatically, “That… that was the biggest… the biggest roach I’ve ever seen.”
Carrie Iverson lives in Chicago and works as a printmaker, painter, and glass artist. She has a beautiful site up at http://www.zahrada.org/.
Maggie, Wow! Thanks for this link. I have one of Carrie’s prints from our undergrad days. I’m so glad to see her work again and know what she’s up to. RZ
Rachel, I love your slam story, and of your two poetry worlds colliding–I was thinking the slam guy was physically heckling your friend Carrie, that he was making some sort of aesthetic statement.