poet's thought bubble

The reading I took part in last night was fun. Roddy Lumsden always runs a good night, good readers, good audiences. I'm not going to give a description of every reader: there's no point, anyway I can't, really, because even after you've read your stuff you're still sitting there thinking about how you think you did.

Well: I was! I had a new poem which I had still been beating into shape at 5pm, which I was determined to do because it was so perfect for the theme Roddy had set for the night: America.

(This theme is so broad it was interesting to see what other people did with it. A few had poems written when they were in New York, or poems about the influence of America on UK culture, and one girl read a poem in which she wishes she was American! One was a paean to American poets - Berryman, O'Hara, etc; two were about September 11th. Several people spoke axiomatically about the "ambivalence" "we all" feel towards America. I was the only American reader, which was kind of nice actually.)

My poem is a narrative about a critical moment on the Fourth of July when I was seven, one of those split seconds when you suddenly jam up against yourself. (I have another poem like that, called "Dissection of a Split Second." It's quite a long poem, which is of course part of the joke. Yes, of course it's funny. And poignant. Getting jammed up against yourself can only be inherently bathetic.) In my new poem, my brother took off his nappy and went running down the street - he was a year old - and my parents asked me to go get him. And I couldn't bring myself to do it - so my sister went and got him, and that was that.

Funny, right?

Well, reading something that new at a reading inevitably becomes an important part of its birth - what works in the mouth, what doesn't work, is it too long, were they interested, did they laugh at the end? I'm pleased to say I think this one did work, but it does kind of mean you sit there half-mulling it over afterwards, trying to gauge remembered reactions to particular bits.

Certainly more interesting than lying on the sofa analysing how your incisions are healing up!

I also read a little bagatelle I have made up entirely of the names of towns in the Hudson River Valley. This is also based on my childhood, when we constantly drove across the Hudson River going upstate and back:

Woodstock, Red Hook,
Hudson, Hurley,
Shokan, Millerton,
Bearsville, Rhinebeck...

Well, really all I had in America was childhood - so I triple-themed my choices: America, summer, childhood. In keeping with Roddy's practice, I read two poems by other poets, & chose two I thought no one else would know (indeed, they didn't). I had first thought of reading an all-time fave of mine by Frank O'Hara, "Ave Maria," which begins: "Mothers of America, let your children go to the movies!" but it was too easy. I just knew someone else would read something by O'Hara, and they did. ("Lana Turner has collapsed!") I tried Lowell, with his amazing rootedness in American history - and presence - but he just doesn't fit my rhythms. I couldn't accommodate him in the shape of my mouth. I wanted an American poet, a poem about America, and something that would fit with my own experience & feelings.

Easy peasy. First, a small delightful poem by Donald Justice about a family saying grace in a house with a plaster flamingo outside, a section of his "Memories of the Depression Years," called "Miami, Florida, c.1936." I love Donald Justice. I love his line, the way he uses caesura to create an amazing insouciance of tone, but one which also carries emotional freight. Unlike Lowell's, his rhythms are natural and effortless to me. Several of his poems are among my all-time faves: "On the Death of Friends in Childhood," "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy," "Men at Forty" (reprised in "The Swear Box" by Michael Donaghy), "The Telephone Number of the Muse."

And I finished with a very beautiful, unusual synaesthetic poem called "Vermont," by Frederick Seidel:

The attitude of green to blue is love.
And so the day just floats itself away.
The stench of green, the drench of green, above
The ripples of sweet swimming in a bay
Of just-mowed green, intoxicates the house...

Unusual for him, as nothing nasty or cynical or creepy happens at all! And more lush and beautiful, I feared afterwards as I sat on the couch listening to the other readers, than either of mine.