Richard Jeffrey Newman

Last Fri­day night, I read at Good­bye Blue Mon­day, a really cool bar in the Bush­wick sec­tion of Brook­lyn, as part of the The Stain of Poetry: Read­ing Series. Not only was it the first time I’d been to a read­ing that I wasn’t run­ning in a very long time – so I could sit back and just lis­ten – but it was the first time I’d read from my own work in at least as long. I was more ner­vous than I thought I would be, and I could feel – though the audi­ence might not have noticed – the awk­ward­nesses where I not-quite-stumbled because the poems I was read­ing were no longer as famil­iar to me as they once were. I was dis­ap­pointed that my wife was not there, since I read a poem I wrote for her, but she had to stay home with our son, who stead­fastly refuses to go to poetry read­ings any­more. “I already know what they’re going to say,” he told us, when we asked if he would make an excep­tion that night. “‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m happy’ or ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m sad.’ It’s boring!”

The first time we took him to a read­ing, he had no objec­tion to going – he was, after all, only three or four years old – but he was adamantly opposed to my being one of the peo­ple who read. I’d asked him if I could read one of the short poems that I’d writ­ten for him and that he loved to hear me recite, and he said no, absolutely not. I have, unfortunately, lost almost all of those poem. They – most were lim­er­icks – were either casu­al­ties of one of the com­puter virus infec­tions that on a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent occa­sions forced me to wipe hard drive clean when I was using Win­dows or per­haps they were lost when I moved all my files over to the iMac that I use now. Either way, this is the only poem I remember:

The boy in the tree looked down
and said to him­self with a frown,
“I’ve climbed up this high,
but I still don’t know why!“
So he stayed till he knew, then climbed down.

So I assured my son I would not read any of our poems, and we went to the The Poetry Project, where the read­ing was tak­ing place; but when it was my turn and he heard my name called my son turned to his mother and asked where I was going. “To read his poems,” she answered. As soon as she said that, my son started not just cry­ing, but scream­ing, at the top of his lungs, and noth­ing my wife did could quiet him. He was so loud that she had to take him out of the build­ing; clos­ing the door to the room where the read­ing was being held and walk­ing to the other end of the hall was not enough.

I fin­ished my poems more quickly than I would have liked and rushed out­side. When my son saw me, he started cry­ing even harder, and it didn’t mat­ter how many times I reas­sured him that I didn’t read any of our poems, the tears just kept com­ing. He cried in my arms, the strength of his sobs shak­ing his small body, while I car­ried him to the car; he cried as my wife buck­led him into his car seat, and he cried right through all of the strate­gies we’d used in the past to get him to stop cry­ing. Only when I began to recite the poems I’d made for him, start­ing with the one I quoted above, did he get quiet, and then when I said them a sec­ond time, he started to smile. By the third time, he was laugh­ing with me the way he usu­ally did. Then, he fell asleep, exhausted from all the cry­ing he’d done.

The only way I have been able to make sense of my son’s reac­tion is that, for him, poetry, not just his poems, but poetry as a whole, had been “ours,” some­thing pri­vate, and the idea of me read­ing my poems in pub­lic made him feel like I was giv­ing some­thing away that we would not be able to get back. Only when he real­ized that “our” poems  still belonged to him, because I was still able to recite them the way I’d always done, did he real­ize that my giv­ing a read­ing did not mean he’d lost them.

Iron­i­cally, but per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, my son began not only to write poetry when he was in first grade, but to pub­lish and per­form his work as well. Two years in a row, when he was in first and sec­ond grade, poems he wrote were selected for pub­li­ca­tion in the anthol­ogy pro­duced by CCNY’s annual Spring Poetry Fes­ti­val, which is also a lit­er­ary com­pe­ti­tion, and he per­formed those poem in front of quite a large audi­ence when the winner’s were announced. He’s given me per­mis­sion to share two of the poems that he wrote when he was in sec­ond grade. (What can I say? I am a proud father, and I think these are very good.)

Hulk

The mas­sive thing that will never come down,
the ter­ri­ble thing that will make you frown.

It’s the mas­ter and it’s the beat. It’s the thing that has big feet.

Mus­cle and strength, strength and mus­cle,
if you want to escape it, you’d bet­ter hustle.

Peo­ple dead and peo­ple cun­ning;
peo­ple stunned and peo­ple running.

It is green and it is mean;
it’s a mean, green killing machine.

It’s the hulk and when it’s palm
shrinks, it’s a lit­tle more calm.

Truth

Truth can be
almost anything.

Truth can be
words.

When I think of any
word light­en­ing flashes
like electricity.

Inside my mind,
truth is family.

My son, rea­son­ably, was quite proud of this work and of the fact that he’d given his own poetry read­ing, but when I reminded him about this expe­ri­ence, try­ing one more time to per­suade him to come with me and his mother to my read­ing last Fri­day night, he said, “Yeah, I know, but that’s my work. I don’t like hear­ing other peo­ple read their poetry to me. When I go to one of your read­ings, where you’re the only one who reads, at least it’s you, some­one I care about. Why do I want to hear about the lives of peo­ple I don’t really care about?” and he repeated what he’d told us ear­lier: “It’s always ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m happy’ or ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m sad.’”

Later, my wife said, “I didn’t want to say any­thing in front of him, but, you know, I agree. Your poems at least always have some polit­i­cal mean­ing or at least leave me with some­thing to think about, because they’re not just about your own feel­ings; it’s about a sig­nif­i­cance beyond who you are. When I go to read­ings with you, though, and I lis­ten to other poets, I almost always find myself ask­ing, ‘Who cares?’”

Okay, so she’s my wife, and she’s biased, but the truth is that I find myself hav­ing the same reac­tion – Why should I care? – to an awful lot of the poetry I read and lis­ten to these days. I will not say that this is a good thing or a bad thing. My own pref­er­ence is for a polit­i­cally and per­son­ally engaged, mostly nar­ra­tive poetry that pays a lot of atten­tion to form and music, and that bias, of course, col­ors my responses to what I read, aes­thetic and oth­er­wise; but even beyond my bias, the poetry of any given time is what it is; peo­ple write what they write; and I have no doubt that it would not mat­ter which his­tor­i­cal period you picked: most of the poetry writ­ten at that time would very likely elicit more of a yawn than a yawp.

My point here, in other words, is not to com­plain about the sorry state of Amer­i­can poetry, as so many have done, using my son’s take on poetry read­ings – which is some­thing many oth­ers have said, though in more devel­oped ways – as a star­ing off point. Not only is it sim­ply not true that Amer­i­can poetry is, as a whole, as self-indulgently self-involved as that descrip­tion would have it, but I just don’t have in me the pre­sump­tu­ous­ness it would take to make that kind of pro­nounce­ment. Rather, what I’m inter­ested in here try­ing to under­stand why, of the five other poets with whom I read last night, three left me feel­ing exactly as my son described, “‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m happy’ or ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m sad.’ Why should I care?”

I need to insert here the obvi­ous caveat that hear­ing a poet read is not the same as read­ing her or his work, and so what I have to say needs to be under­stood in that light. A poetry read­ing, after all, is a per­for­mance, and a bad per­for­mance can turn into a dis­as­ter what, on the page, is an oth­er­wise suc­cess­ful poem. Nei­ther is hear­ing a poet read for ten min­utes a sound basis on which to judge his or her work as a whole. I am respond­ing in this post to a poetry read­ing, and I think it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that going to a poetry read­ing is a qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from read­ing a book of poems, and, even more than that, that we go to those dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, that they fill dif­fer­ent needs, per­sonal, cul­tural, and even political.

There were six of us who read last week: Douglas Allen, Mac­gre­gor Card, Kathy Fagan, myself, Chris Salerno and Rob Schlegel. I’m not going to say very much about Kathy Fagan, whose poems I liked a lot, and whose book, Lip, I intend to buy – here’s a review–because I think our work is prob­a­bly more sim­i­lar than it is dif­fer­ent, and it is the effect on me of those poets whose work was unlike mine that I want to write about here.

The first reader was Dou­glas Allen, whose poems were the only ones that evening of which I did not like a sin­gle one. They were too self-consciously clever and detached, and there just wasn’t enough sub­stance – intel­lec­tual, lin­guis­tic or emo­tional – to hold my interest. I copied down a part of one of his poems, which I will write here as a sen­tence, since I have no idea where the line breaks are sup­posed to fall: “Portable emo­tions for those in soci­ety who lack emo­tional porta­bil­ity.” In a dif­fer­ent poem, another, sim­i­larly apho­ris­tic pas­sage ended with the words “is not even an even even.” It’s not just that I don’t know what either of those phrases means; indeed, I imag­ine I am not sup­posed to know imme­di­ately what they mean, that they are sup­posed to invite me through their clev­er­ness to con­tem­plate what they might mean – it’s that noth­ing about them com­pels in me even slight­est inter­est in fig­ur­ing that mean­ing out.

To make mat­ters worst – and here is where the per­for­mance aspect of read­ings comes into play – the expres­sion on Allen’s face, at least from the angle where I was sit­ting, and the tone of his voice as he read his poems, reminded me of the mock­ing and ironic supe­ri­or­ity with which the come­dian Daniel Tosh deliv­ers his mate­r­ial. I don’t find Tosh par­tic­u­larly funny, but I rec­og­nize the genre of com­edy in which he works, and I can appre­ci­ate it when it is well done, even if it usu­ally doesn’t make me laugh out loud. I don’t know whether Allen’s deliv­ery got in the way of his poetry for me, or whether there really was no poetry in the work that I could appre­ci­ate, but I was sym­pa­thetic to the guy who was sit­ting in front of me, with whom I’d been talk­ing about art and poetry before the read­ing began, who walked out about half way through Allen’s read­ing with a look that said, “Sorry, I can’t take this anymore.”

If I hadn’t been one of the sched­uled read­ers, I too might have walked out, though I am glad I did not, because I encoun­tered dur­ing the rest of the evening poets who, while they did not always move me as per­form­ers, intrigued me enough that I was sorry I did not have enough money on me to buy their books. I am talk­ing here about Mac­gre­gor Card, Chris Salerno and Rob Schlegel. Nei­ther Salerno nor Schlegel – I will talk about Card below – read his work any affect, which made it very dif­fi­cult for me to fol­low, but here, for exam­ple, are some lines that caught my ear from Salerno’s poem “Parks, Recre­ation,” which is in his new book, Min­i­mum Heroic:

I’m wrong. This bot­tle was left here
by kids. They are more

afraid of you than you are of them,
and lay flat as a banner

for sol­diers fly­ing over.

The idea that peo­ple are afraid of chil­dren in the way that oth­ers are afraid of, say, snakes – which is the sit­u­a­tion in which I have most com­monly heard the more-afraid-of-you line – cou­pled with the image of chil­dren as “a ban­ner for sol­diers,” which makes them, at one and the same time, a tar­get and an emblem cheer­ing the sol­diers on into what they are fight­ing for, brings together all kinds of anx­i­eties in con­nec­tions that are worth con­tem­plat­ing and that com­ment in poten­tially impor­tant ways on the his­tor­i­cal moment in which we in the United States are liv­ing. That kind of con­tem­pla­tion, how­ever, resem­bles for me more the kind of atten­tive­ness that I bring to a paint­ing than, say, a piece of music, which is what a poem at a read­ing is. Music, in fact, is the pri­mary thing I lis­ten for in the poems I hear at a read­ing, and when I looked up “Parks, Recre­ation,” I under­stood imme­di­ately why the five lines I quoted above were the only ones I remember. The rest of the poem feels tacked on, and it feels that way mostly because the music of the last eleven lines is so much less tightly woven, so much less inter­est­ing son­i­cally and syn­tac­ti­cally than the first nine. Indeed, “for sol­diers fly­ing over” feels to me, musi­cally any­way, like the point at which the poem should end:

Parks, Recre­ation

Except for clear­ing the land by fire,
not much is legal.

To cre­ate ten­sion, debris lay
on one third of an acre.

I’m wrong. This bot­tle was left here
by kids. They are more

afraid of you than you are of them,
and lay flat as a banner

for sol­diers fly­ing over.
We put our blan­ket down in the fog.

Our kite holds a mir­ror to nature.
We’re dead. Our days are

pressed into slides. I must be com­ing
down with something–

you are stand­ing right there
in the clearing:

tight white head­band, racket
between your thighs.

When I’m wrong, a blush
awak­ens in the sky.

My point, how­ever, is not to rewrite Chris Salerno’s poem for him, but rather to say that the way he read his poems made them sound to me as musi­cally unin­ter­est­ing as the last eleven lines of “Parks, Recre­ation,” which made it very dif­fi­cult to attend to what I think, extrap­o­lat­ing from the first nine lines of “Parks, Recre­ation” is prob­a­bly a vision worth pay­ing atten­tion to.

I had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence lis­ten­ing to Rob Schlegel, whose affect­less read­ing left me even colder than Salerno’s, though I also caught in Schlegel’s work – his book, The Lesser Fields, won the 2009 Col­orado Prize for Poetry – moments of inter­est that made me want to know more. I’ve only been able to find two of the book’s poems online, one of which – the more mem­o­rable of the two – I am pretty sure that he read. I am not sure about the other one, which I find quite for­get­table. Iron­i­cally, though, it is the for­get­table poem, the one I don’t think he read, that recalls for me the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to him:

Lives of Method

Day fol­low­ing day
And the con­tents add up.

These it is
That clash — then widen

The field of questions—

That which law
And spirit leaven.

Speak the world in mul­ti­tudes
And stay in it.

Would that every loss
Reveal its science.

That every prayer
Con­ceal its source.

With the excep­tion of the last four lines, noth­ing in this poem inter­ests me, not seman­ti­cally, not syn­tac­ti­cally, not rhyth­mi­cally, not musi­cally, and even the last four lines don’t add very much, in terms of form or con­tent, to the ways in which those sen­ti­ments have been expressed before. My point is not that every poem in a book needs to sing with an unas­sail­able orig­i­nal­ity. There are poems in my own book that, when I read them now, I think, “Eh. It served its pur­pose in the book, but it’s really pretty for­get­table.” Rather, as with my expe­ri­ence of Chris Salerno’s read­ing, Schlegel’s per­for­mance of his own poems leached from them what­ever inter­est I might have found, leav­ing me feel­ing about all of the work he read the way I feel about “Lives of Method.” Yet, when I read “Allies,” the sec­ond poem from The Lesser Fields that I was able to find online, which I am pretty sure was among the poems Schlegel per­formed – when, in other words, I was able to hear the poem’s voice “for myself,” with­out the inter­fer­ence of Schlegel’s per­for­mance – I found it to be sub­tle, star­tling and unset­tlingly dark. He was, all of a sud­den, a poet whose work I wanted know more about::

Allies

Until some­one steals my coat
I am the younger brother
of each pas­sen­ger on the train.

I pol­ish their black shoes
and offer to clean the mir­rors in every restroom.

At night I sleep and my sib­lings
try to see the pass­ing fields
by look­ing out their windows

but the dark glass only reveals
their own reflections

so they think
if they could lighten their hair, they would.

If they could change their names
they would try that too.

Granted, “Allies” is the kind of poem towards which my bias leans, while “Lives of Method” is not, but I think it is worth pay­ing atten­tion when the way in which a poet reads from her or his work makes a poem that you would oth­er­wise like into a poem that you do not; and even if “Allies” was not among the poems Schlegel read, my point is still the same. His per­for­mance left me feel­ing like each work that he read had more in com­mon with “Lives of Method” than it did with “Allies,” and clearly that was a mis­per­cep­tion of his work that it would be worth correcting.

Mac­gre­gor Card, the last of the four poets I want to write about, is the author of Duties of an Eng­lish For­eign Sec­re­tary, which was selected for Fence’s Mod­ern Poets Series prize in 2009. Card’s poetry is dia­met­ri­cally opposed to mine in terms of how he han­dles mean­ing – which is to say his work is very much about dis­rupt­ing mean­ing, or at least, since it would be wrong to say that his poems do not have mean­ing, dis­rupt­ing con­ven­tional approaches to how mean­ing in poems is made, specif­i­cally by dis­rupt­ing nar­ra­tive. At the same time, how­ever, the atten­tion he pays to the for­mal qual­i­ties of his verse reveals him to be a kin­dred spirit. I wish I’d had the pres­ence of mind to write down the titles of the poems he read on Fri­day night, espe­cially the first one, which con­tained an absolutely mar­velous jazz riff on the let­ter F and, if I remem­ber cor­rectly, the word “fend,” but I became so absorbed in his per­for­mance that, frankly, I for­got, and then, later, when I chat­ted with him for a brief while, I for­got to ask him. So, instead, I will offer as an exam­ple of what I mean by his atten­tion to form and musi­cal­ity this excerpt from the title poem of his col­lec­tion. (I think he read this poem, but I am not sure.) This is the first stro­phe of “Duties of an Eng­lish For­eign Secretary:”

Moon, refrig­er­ate the weep­ing child
and guard his stony brook.
There is no thing between the woods
like music of the band
and I’ve got friends in Lon­don, no I’ve
got friends in Lon­don,
lawyer in their hearth or bil­lion starry heath
in the lan­guage of mine
that they laugh at
del­phini­ums rev up the fire,
really look at them go
lead into the throat
a snow­field gas,
a Crimean slo­gan,
in Eng­land or in sum,
no papers go off bang to pad the fog.

Read these lines aloud and the smooth­ness with which they roll of the tongue makes it easy to miss the degree to which they have been care­fully crafted. The first four lines, for exam­ple, fall almost per­fectly into tra­di­tional bal­lad meter. The sec­ond and fourth lines may not rhyme, but the allit­er­a­tion of brook and band knits the lines together in a way anal­o­gous to what a rhyme would accom­plish, and the asso­nance con­nect­ing brook and wood only inten­si­fies the music. Then, note the play of L and H sounds in the next six lines or so, and then the long O sounds in the next four lines. I could go on. The pat­tern­ing of sounds here cre­ates its own mean­ing, weaves the words together syl­la­ble by syl­la­ble, mor­pheme by mor­pheme, into a melody that is so lovely to lis­ten to that I don’t really care that I don’t under­stand what the words actu­ally mean or that Card intends their resis­tance of an easy nar­ra­tive sig­nif­i­cance to cre­ate anx­i­ety about mean­ing even as I try to make mean­ing of them.

At the same time, though, as much as Card’s music makes his verse enjoy­able inde­pen­dently of what it might mean, the music is also part and par­cel of that mean­ing. The poem’s address to the moon is a kind of satir­i­cal cri­tique of the roman­tic poem in which the moon, say, is asked to bear wit­ness to the lonely man or woman walk­ing in the woods, weep­ing because her or his beloved is else­where, or dead, or dying, or unfaith­ful, and Card’s music, while not fit­ting into any fixed poetic form, nonethe­less recalls in its lyri­cal nature the music of the per­fectly rhyming bal­lads in which such sen­ti­men­tal feel­ings were often expressed. More to the point, pre­cisely because Card’s music is so explic­itly an explo­ration of lan­guage that can be expe­ri­enced apart from mean­ing, his poetry at a read­ing gives me some­thing to lis­ten to, to engage with imag­i­na­tively, in a way that the work of the other three poets did not – and of course it doesn’t hurt that Card is a very good reader of his own work.

That explo­ration of lan­guage is what I go to poetry read­ings to hear, whether it is the kind of musical/formal explo­ration in which Card engages or the kind of explo­ration into mean­ing that hap­pens in a sub­stan­tive nar­ra­tive or lyric poem; it is also that explo­ration, even when it is not entirely suc­cess­ful, that lifts poetry beyond the nar­row con­fines of my son’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, because when a poet explores lan­guage as lan­guage, he or she makes some­thing hap­pen in the lan­guage and that event, that process, is quite dis­tinct from any auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal con­tent the poem might con­tain. What hap­pens might be located in the mate­r­ial nature of lan­guage, the mor­phemes, phonemes, syn­tac­ti­cal struc­tures and more that together make up the way lan­guage sounds; or it might be located in mean­ing, in the mak­ing of con­nec­tions through nar­ra­tive and metaphor between and among the poet’s self, the world beyond that self and the capac­ity of lan­guage to give that world, that self and those con­nec­tions a form that oth­ers can comprehend.

What hap­pens when you hear or read this kind of poetry is that the lan­guage, what is hap­pen­ing in the lan­guage, enters you, changes you and the way you see the world, changes you irrev­o­ca­bly, in ways you might not even real­ize. Mere hap­pi­ness or sad­ness, whether on the part of the poet or the audi­ence, is entirely beside the point.

Tagged Poetry, Reading Writing Viewing, The Politics of Language

§ One Response to “Something Happened and Now I’m Happy; Something Happened and Now I’m Sad” — My Son’s Take on Poetry Readings

• Christina says:

  November 27, 2010 at 12:45 pm

  Your son is right about poetry, though. That just about sums it all up.