On Friday, March 29, I attend Poetry & Biscuits, a series hosted by Carrie Olivia Adams and Fred Schmalz. I RSVP ahead of time as requested, because the reading is at Carrie’s actual private house in West Town and she made food and set a festive spread with nice-smelling candles and Easter tulips and decorative eggs. She made lemon cake, parmesan pepper biscuits, and butter biscuits with strawberry jam.
This is a hybrid event in which the first two readers are Zooming in from Canada. There are two stools in the living room; Carrie sits on one and the laptop sits on the other facing the room. I wave and the readers wave back. Ben Meyerson lives in Toronto and Jose-Luis Moctezuma is visiting Montreal on a family spring break trip. After the Zoom portion of the reading, the laptop moves into a better position so the first readers can see Lisa Dordal and Rachel DeWoskin. When the event is over, I talk briefly to Rachel’s husband, a playwright named Zayd. Zayd asks me what I was writing down during the reading (we sat next to each other) so I tell him. I also tell him I will send it to him when it goes up.
Ben Meyerson’s reading, he says, is going to try to take advantage of Zoom. He recorded a loop of a new poem called “Angles,” which references the concept of the clinamen as found in Lucretius via Michel Serres. He first plays this recording, then turns down the volume so we continue to hear snatches from the first poem underneath the remainder of his reading: “appointed viral eye of the vortex…frayed depth to tug at the entrails of all things…now paired off into monads…resonance rims up and breaches the lips…funnels errant air into time and time and time.” He reads a COVID poem called “The Ovations” dated April 18, 2020. It has lines like “in the garden of this hour…the world will find a way to interface…stillness pools in the retina…I throb with staid time…soon the rain will chime,” and ends “pale chimneys intubated with light.” He has a poem riffing on the first line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “I want to speak of bodies changed into new forms.” There’s a poem about the concept of duende with lines like “Dead clay / effusing in the clatter-throat…a hollow stretched flat.”
Jose-Luis Moctezuma begins by reading the epigraphs to his 2023 book Black Box Syndrome, and by explaining that the title refers in part to Zoom’s grid of boxes with names. He laments that during the pandemic, “you didn’t get to know or connect with your students,” and my companion, who teaches too, whispers to me, “I thought that part was great.” The title of Black Box Syndrome also refers to a problem that occurs in financial modeling of a certain complexity: “They don’t know why they are getting the wrong outputs.” The last thing he says before he starts to read is: “If it doesn’t make any sense, blame the I Ching.” The first poem has lines about “lengthening of the brain” and “what’s in the box.” Outside “the brain / surface,” it tells us, there’s “a machine to rule them all.” One poem is a sequence that begins “inside the mind a box and inside the box / a word and inside the word several letters,” and concludes “in the mirror there are murmurations / and inside murmuration there are star- / lings and in the starling there is mind / and inside the mind the body again & / and then the organs and then the box.” He announces that he’s going to read some poems from the end of the book, “which I never get to”: “their love for sigils engendering a codex…infinitesimal erection…the mind is a place I retire to…my feelings for a horse!” He says the last poem is “what I call ‘the Zoom poem’”: “not faces but black boxes…I get strong feedback.”
Fred Schmaltz introduces Lisa Dordal. The bio he reads says her two most recent books were “listed by Lambda Literary as one of their most anticipated books for 2022” and “listed by Lambda Literary as one of their most anticipated books for 2023,” respectively. “The hype machine is real!” he adds. Dordal sits on the stool that previously held the laptop readers and reads from copies of her last three books with sticky notes marking poems. The first is about a candy store in Hyde Park, where Dordal grew up. The woman who worked there did not like kids: “her squint…branded every kid / a thief.” She reads a poem about her alcoholic mother in the hospital during Holy Week, away from her “jars / hidden in bookcases.” She reads some of what she calls her “daughter poems,” about a hypothetical daughter she herself could have had: “it was this house, only it wasn’t…She wasn’t born, so she can’t die.” She introduces one by saying, “This poem is called ‘There’s the Life I Live,’ and there’s a lot going on.” “[M]y mind // bears a creek deep enough for swimming.” One poem is a list of fun facts like “birds can see stars.” In the same poem, she says, “an owl visited my wife in a dream and … my wife said hello and asked: / Are you the kind of owl that people refer to as a barred owl?” The last line of the poem is: “the owl answered back.”
Rachel DeWoskin is the final reader. She also has a laptop, which pulls up a PowerPoint with pictures and images of her poems. She stays in her seat, a normal-sized chair also occupied by her husband, the laptop screen angled out toward the room and shared directly with the Zoom participants. She says her daughter is a nineteen-year-old visual artist who constructed a photo booth as a part of a performance series DeWoskin curated called “Theater for One,” where each piece is intended for one performer and one audience member. She pulls up a picture of herself in the booth and recites the poem she performed in the series, which rhymes: “this is a rehearsal…it’s a little giddy to see you this way…do you find yourself often? i’m a bunch of stacked selves.” She says she wrote a lot of sonnets during the pandemic because the sonnet is a tidy container to pour mortal terror into. “I find iambic pentameter comforting.” One poem (not in iambic pentameter) begins: “trick question: do prairie voles love?” Another poem, called “chemical peel,” begins: “today I had the skin burned off my face for fun.” DeWoskin closes with a pandemic poem about sanitizing her groceries: “what bagels and bouquets of kale do in a bath i’m / learning…every jam // jar sprayed, surface of each lettuce leaf clean.”
After the reading, I pick up Water Lessons, one of Lisa Dordal’s books, which are set up behind the biscuit spread. Opening it at random, I see a poem about Hyde Park. I live in Hyde Park. I turn twenty pages and see another poem about Hyde Park. It’s $10 and I have a $10 bill. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn arrived shortly after the first reader started, and my first thought was: I wonder if I can introduce myself by invoking mutual friends and finagle a ride back to Hyde Park? Instead, I call a yellow cab, and the driver says to me, “I hope you like Phil Collins,” because we are listening to No Jacket Required on his phone speaker.