'Do You Hear or Fear or / Do I Smash the Mirror?'(1)
By Kevin O’Rourke, Poetry Editor
I am not what you would necessarily call an ‘old hand’ at attending readings. I came to writing seriously & the literary world’s attendant snack tables relatively late: I was not an English major as an undergraduate; I spent a great deal of time during my formative years in white-walled art galleries; I have been known to skip readings by major literary figures in order to watch baseball. My relative inexperience with regards to readings combined with my self-identification as a possible writer-to-be presents me with a curious set of problems/questions. First there is the problem of attendance: do I want to go? Will anyone else go? Are the Phillies playing during the reading? But more pressing (and literarily salient as far as this blog is concerned) is the question of content. What does one read? How does one keep the audience interested? Do I tell jokes, or do I wear all black and growl my work as if a member of some Norwegian black-metal band?
I’d say that I come at writing from a wryly-dramatic point of view; my own work, and the work in which I am interested, could in a way be likened to that scene from Airplane when Ted sees Elaine in the bar, and Elaine is dancing to “Stayin’ Alive� with one of said bar’s patrons, and said bar patron is stabbed in the back and begins to motion, in time with the music, towards his back, which causes to Elaine to mimic his seemingly inventive dance move (for clarity, here’s the link). And while I do work with humor, I also write a good deal of sad, sad, sadness poetry (“I / had an oven of gladness / in which I baked / days of boo-hoo and sadness�(2)), which tends to not so much ‘entertain’ those who hear/read it as it does, well, bring them down.
As the preceding paragraphs no doubt indicate, I’ve no issue with ‘light verse’ (if you can’t appreciate a good dirty limerick, then I probably won’t like you) or funny work in general. I mention this because humor seems to be amongst the chiefest weaponry employed by writers seeking to keep their audience engaged in their reading. Not out of some sense of self-censorship or being ashamed of their more ‘serious’ work – simply because use of humor is an easy way to connect with one’s audience. But that being said, how does one find a balance between the overtly entertaining and the overtly serious? And is the division between the two that stark? And so on.
All of the above navel-gazing is really just a long-winded way of getting to my point: that Nov. 18th’s Dislocate/MFA reading (with guest reader Todd Boss) addressed many of these questions quite nicely. I think the night’s success has much to do with the variety of readers and the ways in which their work played off of one another’s. Luke Pingel’s untitled lyric poems (prose or otherwise) led nicely into Libby Edelson’s domestic narrative which led into Cory Newbiggin’s nonfiction about Star Wars and family which led into work from Todd’s new book Yellowrocket, from which he read a nice mixture of heavier & lighter work. Like a good mixtape, there’s nothing quite like a multi-reader reading: one gets just enough of a taste of each reader’s work to leave the reading wanting more, more, more.
(1) The Who, Tommy, MCA, 1969
(2) from Gabriel Gudding’s “The Lyric�