Five Poets, Two Readings, and One Girl on a Bike

APIARY Contributor Lindsay Steuber reviews two recent readings: Brian Teare and G.C. Waldrep at the Free Library and an all female line-up at Milano’s Pizza.

For my inaugural week of biking in the city (yes, Mom, I’m going to get a helmet this weekend, I swear!), I decided to bike to two poetry events.  In case you’ve been comatose for a while, the poetry calendar in Philadelphia is super busy – two readings in two days is nothing!  If I had the time I could have gone to readings six out of the seven days that week.

First up for the inaugural bike ride outside of my neighborhood was a breezy shoot down 15^thstreet and over to Free Library on Vine Street.  Finally I was able to catch a Brian Teare reading – after that fall cancellation because of the hurricane and my own schedule conflicts, I was starting to think I might never see him read.  Brian Teare and G.C. Waldrep read on the fourth floor of Free Library in a room that, well, could have offered some better features for such a beautiful and historic building.  The ambiance was nonexistent, the room was poorly lit, but the poetry was FANTASTIC!  Teare read from both Pleasure and Sightmap, two of his published books.  It was super evident that Teare is interested in

sound because so many of the poems pay close attention to sound in moving the reader along the landscape of the poem.  The notion of landscape, place and space was a continuous thread through Teare’s poetry.  His closing poem solidified his interest in landscapes as it was a “mash-up” of a historical surveyor’s records and his own “survey” at the time.  He was a gracious reader taking time to explain poems for proper context and generally exuded a warm presence with the audience.

G.C. Waldrep’s poems are decidedly different than Teare’s but the bearded pair complimented each other well.  Interestingly enough, Waldrep began his reading with a couple of thoughts question whether or not poetry can be paraphrased – isn’t that what I try to do here sometimes?  He read some poems from Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, a collaborative poetry correspondence with poet John Gallaher.  Waldrep shared that this collection of epistolary poetry made writing more communal and less solitary; it is considered one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry.  He closed his reading with a poem that used a repetitive image of the “black pick up truck of death” that absolutely blew my socks off.  This was the kind of poem that you hear the poet read and then spend the next few weeks trying to get a copy of that poem.

The second poetry reading the following day had me whizzing down 10^th street to Milano’s Pizza for an all female poet line-up put together by CA Conrad.  There, over the aroma of oregano and murmuring of the television downstairs, I listened to poets Melissa Buzzeo, Kate Lilley, and Debrah Morkun.

Melissa Buzzeo shared excerpts from a long poem she is working on called “Chasm.”  It undeniable ecopoetic in influence, but the excerpted nature of what she brought made it hard to follow at times – I am looking forward to reading the finished product in its entirety.  It’s great to hear poems at a reading that the poet is still working on – ideally that’s what readings should be for along with the highlight reel and crowd pleaser poems if you have them.  Reading unfinished poems out loud to an audience is the perfect way to get a reading on the poem – it creates a feeling in the space that is palpable.

Kate Lilly’s poems, completely different than Buzzeo’s, gave us short snippets of Australian life, popular culture, and

humor.  From the last few poems she read during her set, there was a definitive Freudian thread of psychoanalysis present – it was quite lovely for me since I’ve been doing some research on poetry and memory.  Mystic writing pad, anyone?

Philly poet Debrah Morkun was the person who I was most excited to see read at Milano’s and she certainly delivered.  Though I’ve seen Morkun at all the happening poetry events, this is the first time I’ve seen her read.  It was delightful to listen to some of the poems I’ve read on paper – did you know her most recent book is a number one seller at Giovanni’s Bookroom?  I highly recommend picking up her latest book so you can be enchanted by the ethereal mysticism of the landscapes in her poems.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 3:49 pm. It is filed under APIARY Attends and tagged with APIARY Attends, Lindsay Steuber. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.