I’m going to read at Bluestockings in about forty minutes and I haven’t figured out what to wear yet but I do know what I’m reading. I’m expecting there’ll be a nice audience and I have friends coming, and my girlfriend, and I’m looking forward to it which I usually do cause I love reading. It seems like the most athletic part of our sport. The breath moment. I’m not nervous yet but I hopefully I will be. Because if I don’t feel slightly like I’m going to be executed before a reading then I don’t have anything to work with or live through while I’m up there. My actor friend Tom once told me about something called flop sweats and what it means I think is when you go on feeling flat before a performance and the fear hits you dead on in front of people. Ideally you want it before so you can begin to manage your feeling beforehand and do what you do do to calm down.
After the reading is the part that’s truly hard. If you have a new book the afterward is forestalled. People buy the book hopefully and you get busy signing. There’s problems in there too. Sometimes I forget the names of people I know really well. It’s like the sheet in my brain where their name is written is torn right out of my head. You can’t say who are you to someone you know very well. You can ask them about the spelling but then it’ll be Barbara and she’ll know you are full of shit. It’s best to either ask it straight out or else write nothing and in a moment their name will snap into your brain like fruit and then you will have to make up another excuse to grab the book back and write their name in. Meanwhile I’m stalling for time. When the signing is over, once the reading is done, that’s the worst. Sometimes because everyone thinks you are going out with someone else finally you are standing there with no one except the people who work in the store. Matthew Stadler who lives in Portland where I just read had this experience sort of. Him being alone afterwards seemed to be the plan. The people at Missoula swept him after the reading right back to his hotel before he could say duh and he wound up abjectly wandering into the hotel bar and sat down on a stool where a woman getting a drink was in the exact same situation as him and she turned out to be Agnes Varda who he had a wonderful conversation with. This has never happened to me. The aftermath is generally harrowing. Even if there is a dinner planned I’m not sure where I should sit at the table and something generally gets me there slowly or late and I get stuck in a corner and a marvelous night now feels totally glum. There’s a thing about giving a reading which in fact is that one gets pumped and in the theater world there’s green rooms and one gets shepherded but I’m not talking (I think) so much about fame or power in the theater world vs. the paucity of it in ours though more precisely I mean something about the enormous power of giving a reading and how do you get down from that cliff on your own. In our world I don’t think there’s much acknowledgement of the reading high except that we know younger (and older, people who drink) poets get trashed and that’s a good solution. Retreat into nature, the anonymous, the Dionysian. Just get lost. It’s an issue of transition, the reading aftermath, which might be the most interesting thing to me today. How to get from here to there. And it’s like if you’ve been strong seeming up there – at the podium – the assumption is you know how to make a plan for yourself for afterwards, or you can obviously secure a good seat at the table. But that’s utterly wrong because the de-acceleration is occurring rapidly. The person who read is gone and you are standing in their clothes on the verge of collapse and nobody knows. Poets navigate the highs and the lows. Within the poem. But we also do it between the reading and the world. If you see a poet after a reading ask them if they know what they are doing afterwards. If you are going to the restaurant with them guide them into a fine seat near people they love. There should be an etiquette book for us and our hosts and our friends. Right after a reading or a performance never look the poet in her face without mentioning what she’s just done and say obliviously how are you. Or what’s new. She’s still standing up there on the cliff in the midst of incredible wind. Tell her that you can see that she’s there (i.e. she’s real) and then that you saw her. Help her up, help her down, help her out.
Postscript: Last night it went well, weirdly, maybe because I had consciously been thinking about it. A couple of good friends, Trini and Matt said you want to have dinner. I said uh yeah. But scared. Then Cecilia slid up. Anything going on after. Yes I said gesticulating towards Trini and Matt who weren’t standing by. Leopoldine, my girlfriend was near. Will you go out with a group of people. Yeah she grinned. I love her grin. I think it’s like Paulette Goddard’s in Modern Times but I have to see it again to see if that’s true. The group wandered aimlessly through the lower east side, everyone indulging my need to be in charge looking for a restaurant but I had no idea. I had one but I couldn’t find it. Trini was ultimately in charge and twice she lead the charge and got us into a good one and damn it just worked out. Nobody knew each other but they are all odd and amazing people, the table was round and red and it became a second event not about me at all except that after an event one is a little sticky and if you let the stickiness work increasingly loosening you’ll be okay. But the people around you need to be kind and they were.
Your reading was fantastic. I sat in the front row and laughed and was moved, then moved again by hearing the “hmm” of the audience as they were moved as well. Your essays have a way of pulling the reader along with them in their movements, their tangents, and I was happy to see the effect made all the more exhilarating hearing them read aloud. If you felt you were standing on a cliff, you earned it.
Posted By: Zach Wood on August 27, 2009 at 3:29 pmReport this comment
I read last night at Seven Towers’ Last Wednesday monthly do in Cassidy’s.
Seven Towers publish the late New York poet Ray Pospisil, and are partnered with the Last Wednesday reading series at At Rocky Sullivan’s, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
There used to be a weekly poetry group called WSrite and Recite, made up mainly of men, and itself was a splinter-group that broke away from the previous weekly night it supplanted, Poets Anonymous.
One of the regulars of Write and Recite, playwright and poet Fintan O’Higgins, wrote a very entertaining article on the three year WaR period of weekly reading; published in the e-zine Shit Creek Review, a mag made to happen by Australian poet and cultural agitator Paul Stevens, assisted by the Cheltenham England, poetry scene-maker and one of Wiltshire’s finest, Angela France.
Poetry in Dublin, as O’Higgins explains:
Write and Recite developed, then, as a free-spirited rather masculine arena for poetic expression. Heckling was not so much encouraged as assumed to be the proper response to most poetry and this gave to the evening meetings a kind of raucous freedom that was beneficial to some poets and not to others.
A certain robustness of delivery was necessary to survive the evening which usually culminated in Gerry’s famous Five Word Slam©, where participating poets had the duration of a pint- or cigarette- break to compose some lines using five words suggested by the audience. The results of the competition were compromised by the tendency of audiences to throw up the same words week after week (’nipple’ was a particular favourite), but as an exercise in more or less ex tempore composition it was very valuable not only as a sort of leveller by which the audience could gauge the respective skills of very different poets, but also for the poets themselves as a way to hone their skills and earn sex toys, which were usually the prizes on offer.
WaR lasted three years and it was only when it ended, the worth of there being a weekly gig was rammed home. But the Hamburg Beatles phase had been enacted, a certain sureness in performative scenes had been acquired. But still, you never stop learning live. It take about twenty times out before you graps the fact that every reading is – in a very real way – merely a rehearsal for the next one. In this sense, we can see readings as the opportunity to fail in front of an audience.
Why do we do it? And what’s in it for them? The punters?
Posted By: Desmond Swords on August 27, 2009 at 3:41 pmReport this comment
What a great entry, Eileen! I was riveted whole way through–I can’t wait to go to my next reading, especially now, so I can look for what you described in the poet.
No, but it sounded like a stupendous evening.
I hope you have more of those.
Posted By: N.R. on August 28, 2009 at 9:30 pmReport this comment
Totally blaaarrrr about the post-reading etiquette vacuum. I once did this reading with somebody I admire tremendously who’s a bit older and some other people as well. We all went to dinner after, and one of the other people called out to me, “Oh Paul, do come sit next to [older poet I admire],” which was a real gas for me. But then ten seconds after sitting down next to the older poet, the same other person called out to someone else, “Oh Jane, do come sit next to [older poet I admire].” But there wasn’t another chair next to the older poet. Jane and I exchanged confused glances and then I just got up and gave my chair to her. It would have been much better if the folks who took us to dinner had mapped out the whole thing in advance.
Posted By: Paul Killebrew on August 29, 2009 at 6:03 pmReport this comment
Forgetting the name–I swear I do it once at every reading.
Had that hotel bar experience once, after a reading in Houston. Spent the evening at a Holiday Inn Bar with a Brit crime novelist, also an aged punk. But mostly I go home and try to shake of that weird post-performance feeling.
I think it’s good form for the curator/host to try and make the reader comfortable post reading–I try to do that when I can.
Great post–
O
Posted By: Owen Hill on September 2, 2009 at 6:10 pmReport this comment