Journal, Day 10
Ames, IA / Tina Celona
Who knew Iowa could be so exciting. The reading took place at the Octagon Arts Center in a big room lined with paintings by local artists. Matthew Zapruder kicked off with a typically mournful poem (“the white-tail deer of sadness”), followed by Tina Celona going out on a limb with a long, unedited and uneditable poem met with much applause, to her great relief. Anselm Berrigan read a poem about getting arrested in Jersey after riding on the back of an 18-wheeler through the Holland Tunnel at the age of 14, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson read prose poems from a new manuscript, The Book Of Truants And Projectorlight, to be published as a chapbook by Octopus Books later this year. Tyler Gaston emceed in place of Travis Nichols, the hometown hero, who read blushingly from his chapbook Iowa. Anne Boyer, a local poet, read some flarf poems (constructed using Google searches), and Anthony McCann and Joshua Beckman, wearing twin “Gentle Reader” tracksuits, finished up with “erasures” composed by deleting lines from texts by Keats, Byron, and Mary Shelley. These were surprisingly passionate and beautiful, and were warmly received by the astonishingly large audience of poetry fans, many of whom had driven from Des Moines.
And then the night of debauchery began. At the Whiskey River, a pleasant bar with wooden chairs, green plants, a foosball table, and a bartender who appeared to be wasted out of her mind, we relaxed over cheap drinks, conversing freely with Bret, the New York Times reporter, until Anthony whispered to Tina that at the stroke of midnight he would turn 37!! Matthew bought a round of gigantic shots served in tumblers and hilarity ensued until Travis managed to get us out of the bar and on our way to Katie Geha’s parents’ house, in the case of Blake, Matthew, Tina, and Anselm, and his parents’ house, in the case of everyone else. I was not present to witness Tyler, Anthony, Joshua, Bret, and Josh stumbling along the railroad tracks on the way to Travis’s house, (Anthony stumbled harder than the others and hurt his ankle), nor to observe Tyler, at four in the morning, eating a potato salad sandwich in Travis’s parents’ kitchen minus his shirt. Things were relatively sedate at Katie’s house, where we sat around eating dates, Lebanese cheese, and stew while Blake executed a Twombly-esque (Anselm’s analysis) drawing in cheese on the coffee table.
In the morning we awoke from a sound sleep to a full breakfast prepared by Katie’s parents, Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha, both fiction writers who had attended the reading the night before, and who gave Tina and Anselm grief for not looking to see who was in the audience. Meanwhile the group who had stayed at Travis’s house were at Ames High School teaching the students how to write poems after the model of Nice Hat, Thanks, a project by Matt Rohrer and Joshua in which two poets alternate saying words to create a spontaneous and usually hilarious poem. At the middle school, Anthony, Travis, Josh, and Joshua helped the students write a poem replacing nouns with other nouns, coming up with the immortal couplet “the squirrel is your eyebrow, / the tofu is your tongue.”
Stopping only to empty the toilet, our intrepid gang of poets hurtled inexorably toward Iowa City, home of the monolithic Writers’ Workshop, and arguably one of the toughest audiences for poetry in the country.