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
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No, but it sounded like a stupendous evening.

I hope you have more of those.
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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?
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