Every new age of poetry must confront and reshape the impermanent boundaries between poetry as it is read and as it is heard. The tension between the textual and aural artifact encompasses both the poet who (knowingly or otherwise) must consider his work in light of the rules of his poetic age as well as the reader who experiences the pressure exerted by these same rules. We must, therefore, be mindful of the oral traditions, trends, and doctrines of each poetic age in our attempts to distinguish the performance of poetry with the reading of poetry and we must also be aware that these traditions oscillate in power and scope as each poetic age confronts, recoils, and is devoured by the next. It would be convenient to think in valences, that this poem is meant to be read while this poem is meant to be performed, yet the very nature of our discussion steers us away from this course; even now as I write this in the coffeehouse down the street from my apartment, twelve to fifteen individuals (young and old) are gathered in a table not far from mine and a boy and a girl are reading poems in the center of this crowd. The setting recalls the coffeehouses of Lee Hudson’s Beat Generation, “the east Village’s Café le Metro, and earlier at the Tenth Street Coffeehouse” (69) where the poets participated in raucous, audience-involved performance of poetry. Yet the poetry here is received in silence, broken by the occasional handclaps (or finger snaps) while the man closest to me is listening with his hand on his face in deep contemplation. The scene of the audience is reminiscent of the auditorium in which we heard T.S. Eliot read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to the assembled academia as they sat stone-like, lost (I presume) in the poem’s textual image unrolling itself in their heads. Thus, our definition of a poetry performance and of a poetry reading must be informed by the poetic universe, its actions and reactions, and it must address both the audience and the poet for both weigh equally on our distinctions of reading and performance.
--
ongoing essay
the question, the answer, the finding, the found, the knowing and unknown- every passion, all the time, no matter the difficulty.
All of it still, the vesicle of
pollen poised over,
the light through the black moss,
the x-ray's shadow.
And all the while cocooning the days,
ciphering the eye's radiant chambers,
iris to axon, hill to hillock.
Against an alarm clock's
microscopic tick, asking
only to be like the cell body,
so constant. So simple. Yet
instead, a clutch of sunlight
in an oval basket, bowl of soup
on the counter. Of course
there
are vision that remain. The
glass empty, the glass full. Around
it light overflows towards
a center that slows, slows, slows.
*Gisela Leibold
suffered a small stroke in the parietal lobe of her brain, which now prevents her
from seeing movement
---
one of my better poems this semester. ego trip man.
It's the time of year when many presses are putting together nominations for the Pushcart Prize. We have selected "Untitled (to jenny)" as one of our poetry nominations."
Looking
at the picture my friend sends back after telling him not to go to Afghanistan
-
Mountain,
cinder, cinderblock. Brick
wall damaged by shell-fire,
bicycle
wheel, bicycle chain, bicycle gear. Red
doorway splattered with
white paint, over which a picture of a man with
a cock-eyed smile
agitates.
Poodle puff, low crop of cream spooned on top, some swarm of bees it must have been to keep you up this night-- curler, dryer, iron and pin. holding the thread up to the light, not grey but always turning, like screws in a board or the dial of the tv, fastening the hours. there you sit spooling sand in the house's hourglass. this morning's loom; eggs, toast, milk in the microwave and cereal scattered into bowls the shape of pigeons. its 6 o' clock. I'm 7 years old, asleep but for the door's whisper, the hands that stir the bedsheets, the first face we see in the womb's dark slumber now in the bathroom light creeping in from outside, helping me with my shirt, my blue jeans, my socks and shoes.
