Thursday, October 20, 2022: At the Whistler on Milwaukee Ave., where purple bulbs and curtains make the stage look Lynchian. Locally eminent reading-organizer Joel Craig (formerly of Danny’s Reading Series) is emceeing, and I am seated next to a couple who did not realize that a poetry reading was going to happen. They discuss: Should we go to the patio? No. She wants to stay. They stop talking and text one another until the first reader has finished, at which point they leave. Throughout the reading, a handful of normal bar patrons will arrive, realize there’s a reading going on, and leave.
The first reader is Sara Wainscott, another eminent former reading-organizer (Wit Rabbit). She says, “Someone told me they plan their banter in between poems.” She doesn’t, but says, “I’m going to pretend these are all love poems tonight.” She has never read from her book Insecurity System (Persea Books) in person; it came out in 2020. It’s a series of sonnet crowns with lines like “if I’m a dumb bitch then it’s my job to tell myself” and “Flannel clouds disperse the gray.” When she says, “Do you guys like Bruce Springsteen? I’m sorry,” I feel attacked until I realize she’s apologizing for actually singing the lyric she swiped from “Hungry Heart”: “Lay down your money and you play your part.” She backs deadpan into set-up-less punchlines: “a person who pretends it’s fine / you’re fucking other people”; “obligatory birds appear / to cram their lungs with light”; “When I’m hot at night, I picture / the tax man slowly taking off my blanket”; “Ranch dressing / on the french fries and the salads”; “If you are angry congratulations // on a never-ending source / of wonder.”
Joel Craig reads next—a new poem, nothing from his new book. I suppose he is keeping up his practice of composing a new longish poem for every reading he gives; this process is documented in Humanoid (Green Lantern, 2021), which concludes with a list of reading series and one-off events the poems were composed for. I do not think any of the reading series so mentioned survive. “We need a new messiah because this one isn’t working.” “This room is one big eye vibration because you’re a poet and everything is like a painting.” Craig has a kind of slow, unfolding reading style and his poems are self-referential: “How do you demand an audience hang on your every word?” “Apparently there was a plane with lasers shooting down all the missiles like poets.”
Michael Robins reads third, before an intermission. “You never know what the audience is going to look like for a poetry reading, or how many people are going to show up.” He’s right that the crowd is pretty robust. His first poem filches its title from Ashbery—“A Recurring Wave of Arrival”—and has lines like “following our separate // lines of shadow not fully fallen.” Another poem is about a bee who got stuck in the grease of Robins’s cast-iron skillet, and includes the line “the insects have no egos to abandon.” A poem called “Outer Banks” includes the lines “out from the marram grass, your hands / like butterflies rest their spell on my knee / & I’m moored into the crook of your elbow.” He describes how he began to write prose poems every day in the summer of 2020, starting on the first day of summer and continuing through the whole season. His wife unexpectedly died that August. He declines to read those poems but does read the title poem of his book The Bright Invisible (Saturnalia Books, 2022): “close our eyes / & describe for each other what colors appear.”
After intermission, Craig explains that this reading originated when a Berlin-based friend emailed to ask if he could host something for Ghayath Almadhoun, a Palestinian-Swedish poet whose new book Adrenalin was published by Action Books. Almadhoun begins by apologizing for reading in his shaky English—“now I wish you really good luck”—and begins with a poem called “If We Were in a Virtual World,” whose first line is “The war is over. But the bombs are still falling inside my head.” “All those I knew are dead, or war criminals, or dead war criminals.” The poem has footnotes labeled “Comedy footnote,” “Tragedy footnote,” “Absurd footnote,” and “Tragicomedy footnote.” “We insulted the Red Cross and the Vatican objected…we were saved from drowning and the European Right objected.” “How can I say in the same poem my friends were tortured to death and you are more beautiful than New York, without Lorca laughing in his grave?” “The dogs didn’t howl, the caravan didn’t move on.”
The final reader is Krystyna Dąbrowska; she is Polish and likewise begins her reading with an apology for her accent. (I notice both she and Almadhoun cite the New York Times in their poems.) She has a new book (Tideline, Zephyr Press, 2022), but her first poem is the title poem of a forthcoming book called City of Indium, which she explains builds on the conceit that indium is “a crying metal” that squeaks when you bend it. “It screams and behaves like a living creature, which is inspiring to me.” “An office building in which no meetings could be held over the sound of screaming under the weight of forces unseen to us.” Lines from other poems include: “the warm pull from a sheep eating grass out of my hand with ticklish lips”; “A green angel sculpted by a colorblind father which no church would take”; and “All of us saw you and we will tell you about you.”
After the reading, music comes on and the civilian population returns to use the bar. Johannes Göransson, poet and editor of Action Books, speaks briefly to Almadhoun, regretting that he has to leave to drive back to Indiana.