Making Real Yeats' Gyres
Dateline: 3/10/98Bronxville, March 4, 1998. When Tom Lux asked me to read with Lucie-Brock Broido I expected the earth to crack, shudder, reform and melt space. I mean, after all, Lucie's been annointed by Helen Vendler as Who's On Next, and I am the Anti-poet. At least that's what I feared HV thought when I ran into Ms. B-B in Swansea, Wales (yup, Dylan Thomas's birthplace) a couple of years ago. We were both there for the Year of Literature festivities, and Lucie helped out by scorekeeping the Slam I hosted. She was great! and over Indian later when I bemoaned how HV Keeper of Poetic Flame hated me she simply excused herself and phoned her -- she was right next door! They were roommates! Alas, Helen was readying for Morpheus so couldn't join our revelry, but Lucie assured me she didn't hate me. So I've slept better since then.
Still, Lux was hauling parentheses into the sentence by programming this reading of opposites and something tectonic had to happen. Little did I know that the famed Coeur à Barbe/Coeur à Gaz evening that separated the Dadaists from the Surrealists would be replayed at this reading. Now what follows is a report from a young poet (anti-poet?) who goes by the name of Keystone and, as nearly as I could tell, seemed to be a ringleader of the mad posse that disrupted the reading, making real Yeats' gyres.
--Bob Holman
The poetry event of this year or any year occurred last week on the campus of Sarah Lawrence College. An historic event on any timeline that includes the year 1998. It was a celebration of poetry and anti-poetry, a Happening that seethed deep into the minds of all who attended, in that packed room of mostly graduate students -- wearing nothing but clothes purchased at Banana Republic. Bob Holman penetrated their brains. Their ignorant conception of poetry -- the art that they all love -- may have been altered slightly. But who cares?! They knew it all already! To them, it was the poetry event of the century. They all eagerly awaited the coming of their messiah, Ms. Lucie Brock-Broido (a woman whose hyphenated name is the combination of her mother’s and father’s last names).
Brock-Broido read sufficiently, but was hard to hear. In fact, someone at the back of the room had to request that she speak louder, and it wasn’t an old lady. The most interesting aspect of Broido’s performance was not her poetry, it was when she said that she recently realized that she hadn’t “put pen to paper in almost 1,000 days.” She indicated that it wasn’t uncommon for her to go for stretches of several months without writing a poem. To me, this indicated that she has not taken Billy Crystal’s character’s (from the movie Throw Mama From The Train) advice that “A writer writes. . . always.” Brock-Broido’s reading ended on the same note where it began.
Not one moment of this mood, however, was present in Holman’s time behind the podium. He was introduced adequately, yet somewhat un-updatededly by Tom Lux, author of last year's New and Selected Poems 19something-199something (it’s a reddish book with some fancy text on the cover, some, if not all, typeset on a slant). Holman rocked the house! He was out of place in the academic setting, but only because the audience was caught completely by surprise. How would you react to this guy? He was wearing one of his many hats (although they all look pretty much the
same to me.)
He started off with a new one called “Performance Poem” written in the voice of audience members attending a poetry reading of a performance poet. A perfect one for starting off a reading. In addition, he read “The Impossible Rap,” (my personal favorite on his new In With the Out Crowd album) and even had an old lady in the front row read his trademark one liner “Love Poems.” (Incidentally, she had to read it twice, because someone in the back didn’t hear it.) At some point, Bob announced that he was going to read a poem by the great hip-hop poet, the 16th Century’s John Donne. The poem was “The Ecstasy” and what occurred just after 1 minute and 30 seconds into it was pure ecstasy. Noah Cugir, an undergraduate, stood up at the back of the room, and began reading along! Then, a few lines later, after the line “we know by this it was not sex” Matt Schwartz stood up and began reading a critical essay ripping apart Ms. Helen H. Vendler’s latest attempt Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Soon after this happened, Eireann Corrigan joined in with the whole “Ecstasy” shebang, then the real fun began. . . Jenna Friedenberg and Keystone virtually bombed the place with a true anti-poetry rally, holding signs saying “No Mo’ Po’,” “Death To Poetry,” “Poet: Get A Real Job,” and “Poetry = Baditry,” and chanting the same. As the “Ecstasy” spoke its last lines, Keystone found his way up to the podium and read in a style viciously attacking his audience. The poem he read was Holman’s own “The Death of Poetry” (the published version, not the newer one) and soon after he marched out of the auditorium with those others involved in the sabotage, never to be heard from again.
--"Keystone"
Want to read more? Amazon.com has these books* from Lucie Brock-Broido:
- The Master Letters: Poems (hardcover), based on Emily Dickinson's letters addressed to "Dear Master"
- The Master Letters: Poems (paperback)
- A Hunger (paperback), her first book, now back ordered
These* from Thomas Lux:
- New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (hardcover)
- Split Horizon (paperback)
- & lots of others that are out of print & "hard to find"
And these* from our own Bob Holman:
- Bob Holman's the Collect Call of the Wild (hardcover)
- Bob Holman's the Collect Call of the Wild (paperback)
*As a result of a commercial relationship between About.com, its Guides and Amazon.com online booksellers, these titles can be purchased directly from Amazon.com by following the links above. (Note: Amazon.com is solely responsible for fulfillment of book orders placed through these links.)
