Reflections
A little Alice in Wonderland, a little Black Mirror....
!sdneiff, olleH
My writing news is long so the reflection must be brief. And yet, I spent time this week in Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage and learned he wrote mostly in New York City, which threw open a whole memory box I haven’t opened in years — I’ve always felt kinship to his work—my father read from a huge anthology of Poe’s Tales to me when I was young.
My father, a Lithuanian “Dreamer,” was a chemist at Texas A&M but did the New York Times crossword daily, sometimes writing to Will Shortz when he discovered an error in a clue. He didn’t speak in the multisyllabic English of Academia, though both he and my mother had studied Latin in graduate school and our dinner-table jokes would frequently belie this knowledge (for my brothers: Ostium). No, he preferred Germanic words for conversation but he did once wish to have a Texan teacher fired for using the word “y’all." (It was the angriest I’ve seen him, ranting his indignant rage in our family’s mold-colored Travelall, threatening wildly to face down the entire bored and impassive establishment that allowed such a perversion of the English language and disdained the minor complaints of concerned parents and utterly dismissed any who weren’t born in Texas. Meanwhile, my brothers and I filed away a new parental button to push, y’all.)
In any event, my father and I would learn incredible vocabulary from stories like “A Cask of Amontillado” or the lovely long poems Poe wrote (tintinnabulation was an early favorite word of mine). In any event, I have a long love affair with Poe’s poem, “The Raven” and was thrilled to pay it homage in the newly published “Speechless.” a poem by me which is included in the anthology (see Writing News for the link).
Reading a personal poem aloud was quite a shock for me: I haven’t seriously written poetry for publication since I won a national poetry contest in college. It is a vulnerable thing—like going out in a revealing outfit.
Take a deep breath and hope your self-confidence holds up.
The naked truth? I love poetry. I love to write it; I love seeing it performed. I love it when it exists intrinsically in art even if the art isn’t written word. I believe in visual poetry, poetry of sound, and I seek poetry in the everyday of life. (I usually find irony, but I seek poetry.) I love it and I’m not sure why. Perhaps this is a sign that I should throw my hat into this ring and write more of it. After all, “writer” is a broad term. Yet poetry is also a strange sort of bird: not all writers are poets and not all poets are writers—they could be, but look at the poetry of visual art, or film, or the way some mothers know exactly when to allow their tiny children both silence and space so that the future-adult seeded in that little body can use fluttering toddler hands that one day will tug a lever or press a button to shape the political future to first build a protective fort with twigs and leaves in the mud.
What do those forts protect? Our imaginations. Our dreamiest visions. Our hope.
Until this week, I never realized what a large influence Poe had on my writing. Both of us won early success with form poetry (though it doesn’t pay) and our fiction (which also doesn’t pay) is accessible enough to be broadly enjoyed by whoever manages to find it — and our themes are usually dark but also strangely pleasurable and we often hide social commentary in our fantastic tales of outrageous behavoir. I learned that like me, he liked to dress up - and even as he fell into penury would wear fancy clothes like landed gentry. I was surprised to learn he won only two literary prizes. He was never paid very well, he had a hard time getting published… yet he endures.
Writing News:
So much great stuff happened this week - I hardly know where to begin.
I hosted a Brooklyn Book Festival Event on Friday Sept 27 — a reading at Lofty Pigeon books, co-hosted by Pen Parentis and Mutha Magazine with loads of phenomenal writers and a simply amazing graphic novelist.
(This projection is Liana Finck’s work. More literary celeb photos and names, etc. on this link. )
I also did two readings from the Downtown Poetry Train anthology and they are great fun! (TBH, I’ve done only one as of this writing—the second in the same series from the same book in Baltimore tonight, Sunday Sept 29, at Protean Books & Records from 8pm - 10pm near Federal Hill - come say hi! It’s open to the public.) Full schedule of events for Poetry Downtown Train here. All the activities are Edgar Allen Poe themed! This is all organized by Dutch visual & performance artist Erik van Loon. He is beautifully Dutch: sent me a gratitude email after I sent some photos of the event but told me he didn’t have time to look at them - and five minutes later he emailed to say he hadn’t known the photographs would be good when he wrote that. Ha!!
It was also a great theater week! I saw two new shows. First, Media Re:Versed which I highly recommend if you like stratospheric-energy, breakneck speed lyrics (battle rap) and human beat-boxing. It was the first production I’ve ever seen in which I actually believed the actions of Medea were egged on by the behavior of the men around her. Usually I judge her for making her bad decision, but this Medea is operating in a world where forces are beyond her control. Entirely.
Oddly I later found this phrase in a novel I’m reading this week:
(334 by Thomas M Disch, I thoroughly love this book, though it is very hard to find) — I had no idea Horace instructed the director not to show the murder onstage. Fascinating!
The other new play is (terribly) named The Hills of California (“terribly,” because it is set in Great Britain, and therefore I can never remember the title) — But I just saw it last night (yes, right after my NYC Poe House Reading—the poetry anthology can be purchased here, by the way, if you’re a Raven lover.) The Hills of California has an enormous cast, a huge crew, it has three acts all around an hour long, and it is in a strong dialect - at first intermission, all you heard was audience members saying that friends of theirs couldn’t understand a word and were leaving. It is a very moving play, however, and quite an intense examination of the question of age of consent. Also there is some incredible singing - tight harmonies of a style we rarely hear anymore.
Random Final Thought:
The BKBF event afterparty in Brooklyn landed me in the Hinterlands (a bar that lived up to its name) where I got to sing karaoke for the first time in many many years!
In NYC there are a lot of professional level Karaoke singers. Who are probably actually professional singers. It’s wild.
