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poetry beat : li bloom
A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday April 25 at Myopic Books
Came in late and so missed any opening remarks.
Bloom's poems sound like syntactical chains strung together into a series. Each "unit" conveys some burst of sense although the "units" don't necessarily follow one another in a traditionally coherent sense.
"another world keeps opening your pillow"
"when love produces complexity, suspense hangs"
"mimosa pot Indian rice grass"
She doesn't pause between poems or preface individual poems with remarks, and since the short syntactical units resemble the short syntactical units commonly used as titles, it becomes difficult to tell whether she is reading a series of short poems or one longer poem, although I believe it was the former.
Despite the formal experimentalism of these poems, they seem to be in dialogue with / in debt to a more traditional poetics: the traditional rhetoric of love poetry can be found here, although heavily disordered / reordered (terms like "heart" crop up surprisingly often)
Some seem to draw from a tradition of landscape poetry, explicitly Southwestern landscape poetry: references to sagebrush and saguaros pass by, as well as Southwestern place names (Pima, Scottsdale)
The sensual (sensuous?) is a theme: one poem (a found poem?) is a recipe for chocolate-dipped strawberries
She references an Elizabeth Bishop quote on the relationship between the conscious mind and a poem, and later reads a Bishop poem ("Varick Street") and a poem dedicated to Bishop
She reads two poems from Jane Hirshfield's Women In Praise of the Sacred anthology, by Lal Ded and Mirabai, respectively: she follows up the Lal Ded poems by reading a response poem
The reading is followed with a lengthy Q&A period, during which she recommends print-on-demand outfit iUniverse (her book Radish is self-published), discusses the personal difficulties that fueled her recently-completed manuscript North, and remarks upon her ambivalent relationship to the culture of poetry blogs (although she stresses that "community is OK—collective is OK," she ultimately warns that "[blogging] takes away from the integrity of the singular voice, and the singular voice is what you're after").
Also in this period she discusses the relationship between dance and poetry (she has been a dancer and choreographer before writing poems): both dance and poetry are "about spirit;" both desire to "transcend" the quotidian. She also remarks that the poems are "choreographed in a way ... there's a lot of kinetic energy in my poems." (She shows a manuscript page here, but even a quick glance at her website will reveal what she means)
At around this point, one group perceives the reading to have basically ended and broken up into post-reading conversation, and accordingly begin having a conversation among themselves. Another group perceives the Q&A session as still being part of the formal reading, and want the other folks to keep quiet. Tension flares momentarily between these two groups, which effectively ends the evening (and on what felt to me like a rather sour note). This makes me realize that a ritualized event (such as a poetry reading) demands a ritualized way to signify its completion, although whether this demand should be obeyed or resisted is anybody's call. Labels: poetry_commentary |
