Jim Shell, a friend of mine, a painter and musician, died of a heart attack last week. He was 53, just 3 years older than I'll be next month. My wife and my youngest daughter went with me to the wake, held at his house. There were hundreds of people there to remember a man who had given away more paintings than he had sold. We walked slowly, in alternate tears and laughter, through rooms where dozens and dozens of gorgeous paintings lined the walls and floors and sat propped on the furniture, even on the kitchen counter and the refrigerator.
I hadn't seen much of him in the last couple of years, and I was astonished at how much work he'd done, at how his painting seemed to have exploded in quality as well as quantity. Of course there's a relationship between the two: when you work at something, you get better at doing it.
After the wake we went to the Stammer, a monthly poetry reading and open mic held at ArtSpace in Raleigh (Jim's late paintings made everything there look either too cautious or unskilled). I'm only in North Carolina every other weekend, and hadn't known when I left Maryland that I'd be going either to a wake or the Stammer. I had my laptop with me--I can't read my handwriting--and thought I might read one or two poems in the open mic portion, something for Jim, but Amy Nolan, who runs it, recognized me and invited me to take a 15 minute slot.
Like most open poetry readings, the Stammer is a mixture of the very good and the painfully bad, not much just OK. Most of the good performers--they are performers--are young and black, hip hop poets, everything by heart, everything passionate, full of sex and glory and indignation and laughter and furious beat. I love to watch them work. A gorgeous dreadlocked giant who calls himself Langston Fuze, many with one name: Aqua, Saqid, Ishmael.
Well, here I come, with my pentameters and sonnets. You know who liked them? Those hip hop poets. They heard the beat in what I did, they heard the same connection of poetry and song they worked at. And I'm not bragging, because they and Jim made me ashamed at how little I've done.
10:11:00 PM
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