Missoula Notebook
Song of Myself Checking Out Some Poetry One Weekend In Missoula
By Sutton Stokes, 3-21-08
Last Saturday night found me in the gorgeous yellow high-ceilinged room that will eventually be Scotty’s Table at the Wilma, listening to two young poets read from their work. The occasion was the twenty-ninth installment of the New Lakes, a reading series started several years ago by Brandon Shimoda and some of his fellow UM poetry MFA students as a means of sharing their own work. The New Lakes has since grown up into the kind of event that even poets from outside of Missoula want to participate in. Case in point was one of Saturday’s two readers, Christine Hume, who flew in from Michigan Friday night. The other poet was Jeremy Pataky, currently of Missoula (and also a UM poetry MFA) but decamping for Alaska in May.
Candles flickered on the floor as several dozen people settled into rows of straight-backed chairs which had been arranged facing the room’s tall windows and the mic stand. An informal bar distributed complimentary beer and wine to those who had not brought their own.
Pataky, whose beard gives him the look of the backcountry guide his bio says he’s been (also a snowplow driver, teacher and “getterer,” inter alii), read first. He tended toward a rushing breathless style, giving his words the aural effect of one of the forces of nature that figure so heavily in his work. But Jeremy treats with more than just nature. One poem that begins “The ground floor of your flooded hospital/ is filled with creek rock” moves on to “the expectations around which we purchase plane fares” and concludes “I hear the baroque theme of your film/ bastardized on an anachronistic piano, and I say/ it’s better there than on any tight-strung harpsichord.” My favorite of Pataky’s was the first one he read, “Now That We’ve Framed Up a House.” Eleven intriguing unrhymed couplets evoke the dread that attends the early large life decisions of adulthood — the fear that you have gone down the wrong road, and how will you ever find your way back to the way things were really supposed to be?
We should not have begun to watch the migrating cranes./ We should not have asked questions of the man winching us from the ditch.
Hume cut a dramatic figure, with wild hair and a light trenchcoat-like garment that gave her the silhouette of a movie gunslinger. Confessing her own chronic insomnia before one poem (“Ambien Anthem,” as it happened), Hume seemed in her work to be concerned with overtly dark psychological themes, the traumas and misfirings of the mind. “Meet me at the Budget, in the mirrors that double our medications,” reads a line from “Night in Ypsilanti,” while another poem, “Hatch,” consists of a series of questions and answers that waver in tone between an oral exam, a counseling session and an interrogation.
What do you hear of our talk?/
Blood fastens to insistences of all language at once, alive and lying. All/ tongues unlocked and lapping one another, dousing for routes into bodies.
Both poets read for about a half hour apiece. Hume concluded the evening with her extended work, “Lullaby,” a part poem/part essay just out in chapbook form with an accompanying CD. You have to really want to enjoy a piece like “Lullaby,” as the poet does nothing to make it easy for you. “This one is long,” Hume advised the audience while she fiddled with the CD player, in the tone of a physical trainer implying that it’s not her fault if you’re too weak to go the distance. “So you’ve been warned.” She pressed “play” and commenced to read under, over and with her own recorded voice, which only occasionally converged with the words she was saying live. Behind it all pulsed a heartbeat-like rhythm that seemed to follow from the piece’s subtitle, “Speculations on the First Active Sense.”
Saturday was actually my second night of poetry in a row, for on Friday I’d been among the audience gathered at UM to hear Professor Sean O Coileain, visiting from Cork University in Ireland, lecture on and read from a lament or “keen” composed and sung in the year 1773 by Eileen O’Connell over the body of her husband, who had had a fatal disagreement with a bodyguard of the High Sheriff of Macroom.
A startling number of people showed up for this event, so many that we had to move from the scheduled classroom into a several-hundred-seat auditorium, where many audience members still found themselves leaning against walls and sitting in the aisles. Professor O Coileain lectured on the concept of oral literature, but the high point was hearing him read the poem in the original Irish, a language that sounds to me like a blending of German and Arabic and maybe a little Hebrew and which, when pronounced aloud, seems to bear only the slightest relationship to how it appears in Anglicized spellings on the page. (To give you an idea, the name pronounced Eileen O’Connell is written down as “Eibhlin Ni Chonaill.”)
The poem is all we know of Eileen; we do not even know where she lies buried, much less if anyone sang at her wake. But really, what would you rather have, a headstone, or for the world to know — 250 years after you lived — that you loved like this:
I clapped my hands quickly
and started mad running
as hard as I could,
to find you there dead
by a low furze-bush
with no Pope or bishop
or clergy or priest
to read a psalm over you
but a spent old woman
who spread her cloak corner
where your blood streamed from you,
and I didn’t stop to clean it
but drank it from my palms.
If — like me — you are insecure and lack confidence in your own critical judgment, certain questions may come to mind in the course of a poetry reading, particularly when you are listening to work not yet credentialed by the vaunted “test of time.” “Should I like this?” you may wonder. “Is this stuff really any good?”
“Am I the only one who isn’t sure?”
In a way, the problem with evaluating modern, formless, envelope-pushing poetry is similar to the problem with taking your car in to get that clunking noise checked. You listen (to the poems, to the man explaining why you must now write him a large check), and in both cases it is hard to avoid the suspicion that someone is taking advantage of your good nature. I hope I’m not breaking any earth-shattering news to the poets out there when I mention that the general public is a little scared of poetry these days, or at least can’t seem to find an important place for the most modern instances of it in their lives. Can this be for any other reason than that, as an art form, its standards and goals seem unclear to the lay public? Does the move back toward representation in modern art suggest a new market for art that said lay public can make at least some judgments about on its own, without the intervention of academic experts? Should you ever just ask questions in an essay? (The academic experts say “no.”)
Of course, issues of credibility do not arise in the case of the Eileen O’Connells of the world, about whose work one can reassure oneself with the thought that two or three dozen professors of oral literature spread across two centuries can’t be wrong. But then Eileen is dead and past caring what we think either way, and our urgent task is figuring out how best to live and maybe enjoy some art along the way right here and now.
Why not, as they say, live a little? Buy a painting by an artist you’ve never heard of (a cheap one is okay) and keep your eye out for poetry readings. And if, as you listen to the poets, you feel off balance and unsure of what is happening, just realize you’re not the only one. A poetry reading is a little like watching a movie on fast forward. Certain fragments and themes jump out at you but it’s impossible to really form an accurate impression until you spend some more time with the work, and anyone who seems to have it all figured out by the time everyone is milling about afterwards holding glasses of wine and pieces of cheese on toothpicks is either a liar or an English professor, with the latter being pretty good at putting on fronts anyway (have you been to a tenure hearing?). Whether the poetry turns out to be work for the ages or not, at least you’ve turned off the TV for an hour and spent the time instead in the company of some creative people who’ve labored over something for no particularly good reason at all other than that they wanted to, and isn’t that the essence of what distinguishes us from dumb beasts?
Support your local poets. The next New Lakes event is a reading of undergraduate work on April 8, location to be announced. (Check the New Lakes web site for updates.)
For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.
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