Sunday, January 15, 2023: Cold, cold night for a reading at Hungry Brain, where the doors do not open until 6:30 p.m. and the reading is not scheduled to begin until 7:00 p.m. I learn this after arriving at 6:15 p.m. and encountering a group of people who thought the doors opened at 6:00 p.m. and the reading started at 6:30 p.m. I go for a walk until the doors open; it is soon clear that there are way more people than one would expect for a poetry reading. The single bartender is overwhelmed, and the reading starts pretty late. There’s a patio out back for smokers, and the sound guy gets behind the bar to help.
Simone Muench and Kenyatta Rogers host the reading. Muench offers hope that 2023 will be better than 2022 and apologizes that there are not enough seats. She comments on the sound of the cocktail shaker that accompanies her introduction and introduces Adrian Matejka, the first reader, whose poems “burn us with their voltage” and speak of “America’s seeping lesions of racism and pandemic despair.” Matejka “actually won a Pushcart Prize and wasn’t just nominated for one,” and he takes the stage in houndstooth slacks and a long-sleeved black t-shirt.
He says, “I wanted to have a theme to protect myself from being nervous”: he is going to read only music poems tonight as a nod to the “jazz or jazz-adjacent” show that is scheduled to start right after the reading. He gives Ed Roberson a shout-out as if to assure the audience that a true genius is coming, as opposed to his “more basic and occasional music poems.” He says the first poem, “Record Changer,” is set in the suburbs (where “history is whatever we want it to be”): “One neighbor asks, Now, where did you come from / again? & we say, California, like Fleetwood Mac. / & nobody asks anything else.” “There’s a father sleeping it off in every master bedroom / of the cul-de-sac.”
There’s a poem literally about kicking rocks as a kid. He asks who in the audience is a fan of EPMD—these next poems are for the EPMD fans: “all four of us.” “They’re sonnets—really.” The first poem is about Isaac Newton and basketball: “the back-spinning apple that split Newton’s wig.” “The only time / I dunked, the court exploded like a party hearing ‘You / Gots to Chill’ for the first time.” After, he tells another story about how the poem was originally about Galileo; until a fourth grader wrote him a letter asking for help finding the story of Galileo and the apple, Matejka didn’t realize the error. He says he lied to the kid and made up a story about Galileo and the apple, but fixed the poem. The next poem references Travis Scott: “I’m the highest in the room.”
Other lines noted: “I rise up, therefore I must be like Descartes / if he didn’t finish all the reading,” “This variegated world is your aphorism,” “It was dark & he was dark recuse me,” “previous Christmases piled into / questions.”
He says his favorite song when he was ten was “Head” by Prince. “Everywhere in his own head,” “his actionable / purpleness,” “Prince won’t call because he doesn’t have / a phone,” “thigh-highs / & finery,” “Prince is already there before / he gets there,” “I’m just a virgin & I’m on / my way to be wed,” “bathtub / of surprise.”
While we take a short break, the mic stand is lowered so a seated person may speak into it. Kenyatta Rogers introduces Ed Roberson doubled over in a deep bow so he does not have to re-adjust the mic. He says reading Atmosphere Conditions (Green Integer, 1999) in grad school blew his mind. Roberson is “always talking about what your work is doing…the poems are important because the poems are important.” “It’s about us and the human condition.” Ed Roberson, taking the stage with a cane and sitting down, is visibly moved. He wipes away tears and expresses his appreciation for Chicago, where he relocated after retirement and found a home. His first real introduction to the city was staying out all night with Claudia Rankine and Nate Mackey; he likes that this is a place where people read poems about Galileo playing basketball.
So he reads some Chicago poems and the audience responds, the very title of his poem “The City Sent a High Wind Advisory” drawing knowing chuckles from the crowd. Lines include “turbine leaves on the ground,” “the wind has brought up the bottom of the lake, so dirty you think you can walk on it,” “it’s the foot of the whole lake and you can trip on it,” “if it sounds I’ll go watch it.” He lives in a high-rise building in Bronzeville, so a poem describes “geese flying by below,” “geese flying by at eye level,” “their little asses going in the greater structure landscape,” “they’re looking over you,” “How they do that?” “What you do with what you bring back.”
He introduces poems from his most recent book (MPH and Other Road Poems, Verge Books 2021) by saying, “As Fats says / one never knows / do one.” The motorcycle poems were written on and around a cross-country trip he and some friends made “one year after Easy Rider (1969),” but he didn’t find the manuscript until a few years ago when he was getting ready to move out of his house in New Jersey. He tells a story about pissing off a cliff: “I had to go, I had to pee, I let go on the edge of the world.” Lines about “absorbing the lives / we were losing,” “the cold stray / drop of somebody’s // windshield wash spray…you are reached,” “Peanut butter and jelly faces,” “when we crawled under the mason dixon / didn’t we jump the fence over jordan,” “direction was in your making,” “pinned down by directions,” “simplified for the seeking.” Roberson is again visibly moved remembering a bus full of prisoners sticking their hands out to variously flash Black Power fists and peace signs.
Peace signs make several appearances, including a memorable line about a kid in a school bus tentatively flashing one, to which Roberson’s friend with “both hands off the handlebars open / armed returns a two-hand peace sign with no hands // on the bike.” The room has been totally responsive to Roberson throughout, and explodes with laughter when he describes the way a friend responded to the revelation, more than forty years after the mythical motorcycle trip, that Roberson hadn’t had a license and didn’t know how to drive a motorcycle until they were on the way back. “you was riding in the bitch seat / you was riding bitch // — and with two white boys / cross country,” the friend said. “were you fuckin crazy.” Roberson couldn’t figure out how to incorporate this fact into the macho then-time of the poem, settling on revealing it via this argument that happened decades later.
The end of the poetry reading runs into the stated start time of the experimental jazz show. The musicians take some time to set up, and they start to play forty-five minutes after the end of the reading. They play two sets, and I stick around for both.