Journal, Day 22

Montreal, Canada, en route to Northampton, MA / Kate Hall

We read last night at The Green Room, a bar in Montreal in the Mile End District. The reading was well attended. It amazes me that everyone on the bus has performed so well for so many readings in a row. Thomas Heise and Erin Moure are local Montreal poets who joined us. Erin gave a great reading from her book Little Theatres. The poems incorporated English and untranslated bits of French, Portuguese,and Galician. She introduced the book by stating that the poems were in Latin, just many different kinds of Latin. With emphatic voice tones and gestures Erin is always engaging and each poem is exciting because her voice rises in surprise at the end of each line as if the turns in the poems surprise her as well. Because the poems switch so fluidly between languages, the musicality of the poems is heightened. As you listen there are points where you do not understand the specific words (in French or Galician for example) and so instead we are forced to piece together some kind of meaning from our own language that surrounds these passages.

Typing Explosion also had another amazing performance in Montreal. This time they read some of the poems they created. They begin each night by allowing audience members to either select a subject card or write their own. All three girls are sitting behind typewriters dressed in vintage clothing. Then an audience participant hands the card to the first typist and she begins the first few lines of the poem and they continue down the line until there is a finished poem for the participant. Typing Explosion is composed of Sierra Nelson, Rachel Kessler, and Sarah Paul Ocampo. They first performed in August 1998 at a Seattle art gallery where they wanted to use poetry in an interactive and inviting way so that the audience could either observe or participate. Sierra, Rachel, and Sarah Paul all owned 1960s typewriters and loved vintage clothes and based the style of the performance around their love of that kind of aesthetic. After 2004 they stopped performing as Typing Explosion as they started individually developing other performance pieces. The bus tour is the reunion of Typing Explosion and they’ve gathered back together for this purpose. They are incredible. The audiences in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal have been enormously responsive and the performances at the events illicit a lot of audience participation.

Weary travelers wanted warm beds to sleep in at the end of the night so we found them places with Montreal writers and everyone got a good sleep and a shower. Now we are driving out of Montreal following the French road signs toward the Pont Champlain (Champlain Bridge) and are heading for Northampton, MA. We’re listening to upbeat music this morning and everyone is wide awake and eating croissants and Montreal style bagels. The bus is a capsule of various conversations and there is a tapestry of murmuring about poetry and plans. Every now and then one voice rises and I catch a few words of each conversation and they become spliced together:

if someone switched over, it would not be what I want, can we sing border crossing as we cross the border…