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Bright College Fears
I’m posting this from a dorm room in Timothy Dwight College at Yale, where I am beng housed before giving a poetry reading tomorrow as part of the 30th reunion of the class of 1979. It’s a brick building, not one of the gray Gothic ones I liked to frequent as an undergrad, which helps me feel more removed from the carousing outside my window, still going strong just after midnight.
I’ve been enjoying planning this reading. I want to share poems that touch on the kinds of common experiences my classmates have probably all had in the last three decades, mostly death, birth, and love. As I say this to a small group of folks imbibing cucumber flavored vodka (delicious! organic! and much better than the beer at this particular shindig), someone asks me, nervously, how hard my poems are to understand. I”m sympathetic. Probably half of the contemporary poems I read or hear leave me feeling stupid–and I think about poetry all the time. I feel genuine sympathy for the layman in this situation.
I hasten to reassure him, saying that I think they are pretty accessible, but my goal is to make them beautiful too, so that even if you don’t understand them consciously, you don’t feel cheated but can allow them to work on a chemical level.
Like many theories I make up as I’m saying them, it strikes me first as a bit disingenuous, but on examination as actually rather true. But I’m nervous! Here’s my general audience coming…
(beat) Now it’s the next night, 11 pm, the reading safely over, and the deiivery of the reunion poem i wrote especially for the class dinner over too. And guess what! There IS an audience for poetry, if we want it! The last kudo I heard, before stumbling, half-pickled on cucumber vodka after dancing my heart out to 70s music for a couple more hours, was “thank you! you captured it all.”
What more could a poet want?
Viva l’occasional poem!
2009-05-30
Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 by Annie Finch.
Comments (3)
Congrats!
The poem-net, capturing the butterflies of remembered experience. The poem-chrysalis, setting the butterflies free, transfigured.
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If you want to learn from someone who is really extremely capable in a Live setting, Jane Hirshfield’s the person to study. Very pleasant, immediately drawing the crowd to her at chemical level, her body language alone making everyone feel jolly and she has an absolutely MASSIVE REPUTATION with a body of work known all over the planet, to make you feel at ease when under her spell.
i can’t tell you what a great pleasure it is to be here tonight. It’s an extraordinary privilege to be reading with (insert name/s) and to be giving something back to people who have given so much – is the first thing you have to say, even if you’re reciting in a crack-den in the Hollywood Hills with classically trained musos addicted to hard drugs after a life of hell performing in front of millions and lost in a nightmare of having too much opportunity to know what to do with.
…to be able to do a benifit reading, is no small privilege for me – soo, thank you, all of you involved with making this amazing event happen… – at this point you must really care about the assortment of oddballs and weirdos who turn up to these do’s.
I’ve decided to force myself to stay on the theme tonight and printed all the poems out on the page so i couldn’t change my mind: so i can’t read (insert name of most famous poem) because i haven’t got it with me. – if you are in the audience, politely laugh then:
..switch vibe close-back slap down a marker and lash it out — some mid-seventies political Marxism a la Amiri Baraka, then dance around a gove of handbags with an imaginary Erato and watch your audience gasp in horror and lurve.
bah !
Poetry, it will do nothing for you unless you pack in now and stop writing.
don’t end up like me. 29 years i devoted myself to making a financially sustainable life and career out of poetry and all i got was open-mic hell, conspiracies round the dried up well – elbowed out and now the Muse has gone and left me, i am taunted from afar by voices circling a hallowed form at Ormskirk Civic Hall – creeping up paper-on-stone magnolia walls.
..poems also have unknowable fates. You write one poem thinking it will be used for one purpose and it ends up being used for another.
Experimental free flowing, finally a form has come, singing in long loud drawn out vowels and swift sharp city sounds of Paul and John — ring a ring a poesy a pocket full of George, by the telepathic act of wish-fulfillment which wrought well at source – Ormy boys forever, we loved an unknowable God – two distinct accents jostling in the voice searching for balance there, plastic or concrete always and everywhere love, codding it, faking sounds of something we were not, Ribble or Mersey, Brooklyn or the Bronx, two-faced turncoats we can blow either way, it’s all the same for a few from Coronation Park who end up talking straight.
…and then the one other thing running through a couple of the things i’ve chosen, has long concerned me, which is a theme of unknowability and fate. You know, what happens up to any person in their life is to some extent an accident of birth, out of control and this haunts me.
Yeah, go see H and listen to how the words she delivers at first to the untrained ear, sound as if its a computer generated voice being spoken on Microsoft Word:
…it haunts me – my own good luck: the less good luck of others, and also the essential unknowability for us all of anyone’s life, including to some degree our own.
And then shiver as you realise, it wasn’t her but you who was the cod in a room of the few upright lot, each syllable weighted, each off-cut of air, precise and staccato, softened by an exact music which reaches toward song whilst never falling conspicuously into it. Uniquely American and very distinctive. Her chimes and rhymes not clanging, are very deft and her poems not woven with sing-song lyrical weft, but flawless sense and sensitivity. Go – listen to Hir
sh !
field a play softly sing of it -
Ah ! there was Poetry, on the cobbled streets of our market town, granted its charter by Edward I, to those Augustian monks from Burscough Priory – founded by Robert Fitz-Henry, Lord of Lathom in 1186.
History there also, in the original church built by Orm, a Norse raider, who settled the sandstone bluff on which he built his kirk, wrested from whatever Angle, Brython and Saxon fought over what became Ormskirk – in our control as the cohort reared on Wham and Wah, George and Pete, Michael and Wylie, all our youth now spent, living as memories painted in a grey mass sandwiched in the covering skull-dome, a place called home – Poetry singing in Lancashire, so.
Keep it up. Great stuff. checks in the e mail.
Lennon (says)
grá agus síocháin
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Fun note, Annie Finch. My experience too is that, no matter how many readings I’ve given, the next time is still the first time and a bit nerve wracking. Well, maybe not exactly the first time. After my first reading I sat in a car and shook violently for a good half-hour or so. Of course, making the connection with your audience is what makes it all worth the nerves.
Terreson
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