A few days ago I noted that I'd be going to yesterday's discussion and poetry reading "Women in the Avant Garde" at St. Mary's College. All 5 of the invited poets (Laura Elrick, Heather Fuller, Carol Mirakove, Kristin Prevallet, and Deborah Richards)1, were terrific performers (especially Laura Elrick, who has astonishing control over the pace and intonation of her voice), and they were all impressive in the Q&A presented to Kaia Sand's class.
Each poet (presented in alphabetical order) did a twenty minute set, with a short break after the third reader. Two hours, 8:15 to 10:30 on a Friday night, is a long time to listen to poetry (it would be a long action flick!), but the 150+ people in the audience were attentive, even, at times, rapt, and only a very few left during the break. As I said, these were terrific performers.
All of them pushed hard against ordinary syntax, but technically, they worked very differently. Heather Fuller had more narrative and more place, perhaps coming from her work in animal rescue and in political advocacy for the rural poor. Carol Mirakove, Kristin Prevallet, and Deborah Richards all read (among other things) cut ups, but Carol's were longer, identifiably separate pieces juxtaposed in ironic and sometimes savage comment on each other, while Kristin's appeared to be shorter fragments, hardly enough to establish themselves, used to create a more cohesive emotional tone, and Deborah's were, again, longer and identifiable to the ear, but rather than commenting on each other, they were used, through the repetition of the banal language of technical journalism, to document and make emotionally real the horrific treatment of Saarti Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus." (I loved the moment when she interrupted herself after a line saying that Baartman's remains were on exhibit in a museum: "That's not true. She's been buried now.") Laura Elrick and Kristin Prevallet read shorter pieces than the others and so had a little more time to show other sides of their work. Laura, as I said at the top, has amazing control of her voice, seeming to be able to stop and start mid-phoneme, generating rhythms out of air—a particularly effective piece included only words from a list of 200? "sight words" used to teach reading. Kristin sang a beautiful, surreal mountain lullaby, and read a wonderful poem about a woman who ran to keep her sanity, running in circles around her tank battalion in the Iraqi desert during GW1, dropping as she ran the medication supposed to protect her from the "chemical warfare of the enemy and the chemical warfare of the Army."
I had a wonderful time. I was invited, by Kaia Sands and her husband Jules Boykoff, to a party afterwards where I met and talked briefly with all the poets (a little more with Carol Mirakove, who works as I do in the software biz), and finally got to read some of Kasey Mohammad's Deer Head Nation. I spent most of my time talking with Deborah Richards' friend Camilli (maybe he'll let me know how to spell that), since he and I had both been up since 5 in the morning and weren't so good at standing and mingling by then. The only jarring note for me was the politics. I'm politically closer to these folks than I am to Our Dear Leader, but not by a whole lot. (But I loved Jules Boykoff's Reagan boxes.)
I was impressed. And I was reminded of one of the big reasons I turned to meter: I'm a pretty impressive performer, too, judging by audience reactions at my readings back in the 70s and 80s, but when I heard other people read my poems—even other poets—they too often fell flat, affectless. You had to get the poem in order to be able to read it. Similarly, Laura Elrick opened with a magical reading of "Sleep," but there is nothing I can see in the text to help a reader do what she did. In fact, the printed form seems almost to work against the marvelously varied rhythmic effects she managed. Hers is, perhaps, the most extreme example, but the same is true of other pieces by the other poets. Deborah Richards read her long piece backwards, page by page.
Meter guides the reader, even to point of subtly promoting or discounting a word or a part of a word just because that's how the meter goes in that place. Some claim that meter, for the same reason, is too rhythmically restrictive, and too slavish a reader will hear only "tub-thumping," but a reader willing to be guided can discover complexity through the tension between ordinary speech and the demands of meter. That tension disappears when meter disappears. Here's an example of how meter can help a reader, a poem of mine chosen not because I think it's wonderful but because there happen to be two readily available recordings of it at the same site, one by me and one by a man I've never met except through Usenet, who had not heard my recording when he did his. His version is better than mine.
It's entirely possible that, if I spent more time with these kinds of poetry, I'd find a key, a clue, which would help me read the printed texts just as meter does. But that brings me round to audience, the subject of most of the questions in the class earlier in the day. All the poets were acutely aware of the problem of audience (and a little stunned by the turnout that night). Kristin Prevallet said "None of us will ever be published by Random House, if we keep writing the way we do," and no one objected. But the avant garde once hoped to become or to replace Random House. It is, after all, a military metaphor. These talented writers and marvelous performers seem content (not quite the right word) to remain at the margins. One person asked "How do you write for those who just don't get it?" and the only answer was to "just keep scratching at the surface."
Well, I'm glad they're doing it. I learn from them, I hope, and in fact I got several ideas last night for new pieces. And these five poets certainly have a larger audience than I do, so what do I know.
1Googling the poet's names returns lots of links, some of which I mentioned here.
4:35:41 PM 
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