Poetry at the UAG, Take 1 (or, A Vast Been Recalled)

Christopher Rizzo, UAG Gallery, Albany, New York (25 Jan 2008)
The two forks of that little poetry reading, on the cold winter’s night of January 25th, 2008, in a winter light on cold and heavy on grey rain, began as poetry readings invariably do: late. At 7:18, Christopher Rizzo—eyes dark from too many months toiling mightily on his PhD, but still with a smoky handsomeness, his dark jacket formalizing the mood—opened the night. Chris inaugurated the poetry series at the Upstate Artists Guild, “Poetry at the UAG.” In the audience were Pierre Joris and Don Byrd from the University at Albany, plenty of their graduate students, and a good percentage of the poetry aficionados of the area.

Thom Francis, UAG Gallery, Albany, New York (25 Jan 2008)
The first poet Nancy and I did not know, although he is a well known local poet and president of Albany Poets. Thom has been giving poetry readings in the area for about fifteen years, though he hardly seemed old enough to have. He opened his set with something of a surprise, at least for me: he read from the Book of Job, Chapter 29. It seems to me that this could have been a jarring hokey way to begin a reading, but it wasn’t at all. Thom has a good reading voice—clear, strong, emotive, yet not mannered at all—that really befits the reading of Job, maybe even the being of Job, and the poetry of the King James Version of the Bible is unmistakable, powerful, chiseled. We were off.


Thom Francis Reading “Hero” (25 Jan 2008)
Thom talked to us, noting that he saw “a lot of new faces in the crowd,” yet using a line he said he uses often: “If you’ve heard these before, you’ll like them again.” His poetry had a driving simplicity to it. The words and meaning in every poem were absolutely clear, even prosaic. His voice, with its almost syncopated cadence, carried them well, yet every poem’s point was clear from its first line, sometimes merely from the title. Anaphora was the main poetic device in the poems. “Doctrine” was about the cancer of doctrine. “Cast” presented an overdramatic populism. “American” was about recruiting high school boys to be “robots for the cause.” The poem “Hero,” spoken from the point of view of a son whose father has abandoned his family, is emblematic of these poems. They are simple proletarian pieces, small protests against the indignities of life. Though without much uplift, Thom’s presentation, and his kind manner, made the poems dance their particular dances well. And it was a great joy to see how honestly he thanked and then clapped for the audience.


Michael Peters, UAG Gallery, Albany, New York (25 Jan 2008)
I was at this reading to hear Michael Peters, poet, visual poet, fictioneer, musician, critic, singer, sound man. I was there to see what he would do, so I was most interested in how long he took to set up for the reading. Placing cymbals on their tall legs. Erecting a triangle of grates. Arranging arrays of electrical equipment to counter the jungle gym of percussion. His process was methodical. He had something in mind, though exactly what was not clear until he started.


Michael Peters’ Introduction to His Reading of vaast bin (25 Jan 2008)
Michael bean with a long introduction, a disjunctive and conjunctive ramble that tied things together and pulled them apart as he went. He wanted, he told us, a “thematic typology” to hold the reading together, but what kind of “thematic typology” to use? He told us he wanted “to do a great* reading,” not just an adequate one. The intro was exactly the Michael I know: a guy with so many ideas buzzing in his head that they each interrupt one another over and over again before he has a chance to corral a thought, to rope its legs together and control it. I find the process of listening to him fascinating, but I had no idea what fascinating would be like.

To prepare for his reading from his recent book, vaast bin: n ephemerisi, and interfiled selection of visual and textual poems, Michael picked thirteen numbers, each representing a poem in his book, and he laid them out in the sequence that appeared as each number arose from his box, and the sequence was

127

317

257

37

271

191

349

3

109

307

13

229

though I seem to have missed one of these. Before beginning the reading proper, Michael fiddled with his electrical equipment, creating first a large mechanical humming sound, then he recorded the sound and repeated it, causing a kind of shuddering sound. Then he stood up and


Michael Peters Reads vaast bin -1 } 349 (25 Jan 2008)
he transformed into somebody else. I thought of the poems in vaast bin as quiet poems, yet Michael read them loudly, forcefully, intensely. Michael transformed from a manic thinker into a focused performer. One eighteen line poem took him over five minutes to read, with the pauses for sound, for the scraping of cymbals, the tinkling of grates, the running of reverberating sounds. Much of his performance was raucous, stentorian. It was an event.

And as accessible as Tom Francis’ opening poems were, these were demanding of the reader. I followed along in my copy of the book to try to keep track, but there was no holding on to all the puns, the outré spellings, the intertwining of image and sound, the popping of veins in his face and tendons in his neck. At the end, Michael looked at his watch, apologized for the length of the reading (What length? I wondered) and returned to his old self.

I can’t capture all of this reading, but I did post eleven videos of it on my YouTube site. My camera spins around trying to keep up with Michael as he reads, and some of the angles of each long running shot are quite awkward, with blades of light cutting into the screen, but I found all of this appropriate for Michael’s way, for this particular manifestation of this particular poem (more on which eventually).

______

* Of course, as Nancy has pointed out, he might also have intended the idea of a "grate" reading, the concept of the grate appearing throughout vaast bin.

ecr. l’inf.