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comic-bookesque Communist Soviet motif
Thursday, March 7 2002
I took Sally on accelerated dog walk this afternoon, riding my bicycle while she ran beside me. We did a loop through the Vale of Cashmere and through a tunnel near the Brooklyn Zoo into the Long Meadow and back again, all in a half hour. Sally kept up a good pace the whole time, even pulling me along by her leash for some stretches. The only time she became distracted from the task at hand came as we passed a squirrel-rich wooded section of the Long Meadow.
The evening was spent in the East Village socializing with Gretchen's friend Jenny from California, whom Gretchen met back when she worked a stint on an organic farm near San Francisco. "Jenny's my only friend from California," Gretchen told me, alluding to her realization, while in California, that she herself was an East Coaster through and through and would never be happy west of the Mississippi. With Jenny was her girlfriend Andrea, with whom Jenny intends to have a baby. If that baby should be named Heather, well then Heather will have two mommies.
We did an inexpensive dinner at the Veselka, the world famous Ukrainian eatery, and then continued on to a bar called KGB, where a group of Sarah Lawrence students and alumni (including Gretchen) would be reading their poems. KGB is a wacky place decorated through and through in a comic-bookesque Communist Soviet motif, complete with framed Cyrillic posters, hammers & sickles, and walls painted red. In a concession that it's all in jest, there's a sign over the door saying simply "Temperance." Such decor might have actually been controversial back in the 80s, but in these uncertain times everyone seems to have nothing but fond memories of the Soviets. If one wanted to open a truly controversial joint, it would be called Osama's and (in keeping with the teachings of Mohammed) all the beer would be non-alcoholic.
My, were there ever a lot of Sarah Lawrence poets! We packed in like snakes in an Indiana Jones crypt. Since the poets were overwhelming college age and female, KGB was transformed for the evening into the ultimate experience for those in search of intelligent white women. "This really is a white crowd," Jenny observed with some dismay. I looked around and was astounded to realize that even Republican conventions run a couple shades darker than this (if only for orange Bob Dole makeup). "There aren't even any Asians here!" I agreed. Actually, there was a young Asian woman who popped in at the last moment and was allowed to read a prose piece, but the weirdo mistress of ceremonies unceremoniously cut her off midway through, not even allowing her to finish. It was nine o'clock and time for the poets to disburse and turn KGB back over to its regulars.
Before that awkward conclusion, though, Gretchen got a chance to read her poem Parting.
(I reproduce it here with permission)
Parting
Meanwhile everyone here
wears too much skin,
out for everyone to see: hands,
faces exposed
and blinding. We women lounge
about the bar like a stable
of horses. Across the street
buildings are basted
with sweet painted
sunset, dissolving
into space. Meanwhile
my blood is glass.
In a few minutes I will engage
the bartender. In a couple
of hours we will make our way
to the door marked Authorized
Personnel, and I will do it
for love,
though not his.
It was a great poem, of course, but the reading also went well. The microphone didn't feedback, the crazy mistress of ceremonies didn't interrupt, and the drunks out on the street weren't as loud and obnoxious as they'd been during other readings.
Many of the poems were excellent, though others were disjointed, improperly organized, or infected with cliché. One woman tried to poetically tie the September 11th tragedy to the Buddhist concept of the Bardo and then to her own personal problems and ended up with a clunky monstrosity. "There's been a lot of bad art coming out of the September 11th tragedy," I reflected later. But since I was there mostly in my capacity as a faithful Gretchen partisan, I mostly amused myself by dissing other readers through subtle facial expressions and whispered comments in Gretchen's ear. But even I, Neanderthal from Bumfuck, knew we were listening to a dreary piece when I could anticipate the wording of sentences by how they had begun.
There are two things that really seem to tick Gretchen off about other poets. One of these is when a poet reads in a pre-fab "poetic lilt," where the end of every line is denoted by an obvious slowing of the delivery. Normal people do-n't ta-a-a-l-k. Like that, d-o-o t-h-e-y-?-?" Gretchen likes to mock. The other big thing that drives her crazy is any and all reference to Dante. Her observation on this subject runs something like, "Why do people have to prove they're educated in exactly the same way?"
As for the others at our table, they seemed to be enjoying themselves and their non-alcoholic drinks (Jenny and Andrea are Buddhists, though I don't know what Buddha has to say about such drinking). For her part, Jenny was just glad she wasn't a part of this scene,
"I could never do this," she observed, adding, "The post-graduate MFA world is too competitive for me. The way some people get more applause than others, ehh..."
By now we'd picked up one of Jenny and Andrea's friends, a youngish woman named Onah or something like that. She hailed from Greenpoint (over across the East River, north of Williamsburg in Brooklyn). We all went together to Gretchen's favorite coffee house, Raphæla's and had something of a second dinner. I ordered a huge plate of pesto linguini, others ordered fruit, cheese, and chocolate cake as rich and dark as tar. Everyone shared. Topics discussed were based around a variety of questions, including:
- What can be done about the fact that there are so many more poetry writers than readers?
- Do colleges and universities acknowledge in their programs that some people are better at critiquing than writing while other people are better at writing than critiquing? Do schools even bother to emphasize the value of critiquing? (Jenny noted, "Gretchen, you're good at critiquing because you're unusually outwardly-focused.")
- Is there any lesbian content in the story of Ruth from the Bible? The woman who alluded to Ruth in a poem she read tonight - had she found lesbian content in that story? (By the way - I was the only person at our table who had never self-identified as a lesbian.)
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