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Poetry Reading at 414 Tangeman First, I must say that this poetry reading was anything but boring, in fact it was interesting and actually fun. I usually enjoy going to poetry readings, but often I am disappointed by either the content of the poems or the way the author chooses to fizzle them out in the reading. This did not occur at the poetry reading at 414 Tangeman on Thursday the twenty second. The main problem I found was that the good looks and charm of the poets was very distracting. (No, really.) I enjoyed the informalness of the reading which started off with an energetic reading by a one, Dirk Stratton. He read three poems that varied drastically in theme. His first poem was entitled “Its.” I feel the poet could have read this particular poem a little slower, I wanted time to savor and digest what he was discussing. There was an interesting conversational style to this poem. It was speaking of the body, and, if I am correct, it was using the Bible reference of Paul. I would very much like to read this poem myself, and understand it more fully. The second poem was entitled “You left me waiting in the truck.” This poem was a perfect public, out loud kind of poem. It was read, very much, in a way that drew the audience in with anticipation. Surprisingly enough, the poem did not disappoint, as the ending had a big bang, especially in the way it circled back around to the beginning. My favorite part of the third poem was its personification of passion, especially turning it into one of the “usual suspects.” I loved Scott’s poems, but I would have preferred to have heard them read by Scott. William reading Scott’s prose was all wrong. Don’t tell William, but he just doesn’t have the sex appeal required to read “Bombs Making Love.” I tried not to focus on the reader, but just enjoy the work itself, which wasn’t too hard to do with a work like that. The poem about Cincinnati, was fun and had a Dr. Seuss kind of feel to it. William’s song kind of caught me off guard. My first instinct was, “this is going to be dumb.” I am pleased to report that I was mistaken. It as very funny and intelligent. William was much better at reading this kind of work than Scott’s, and was cute and demure in his reading. He made effective use of his eyes as one of tools necessary to convey his smugness. Of course, the ultimate point of the evening was the revealing of the hypertext. This was a lot of fun. I do have to admit that I enjoyed each poets works so much that I would really liked to have heard more. The poetry and prose were more revealing of the poets, and I liked the little window into who they really were more than the fantasy of the hypertext. I would like to play around with the hypertext myself, on line, but at the reading I would like to have heard more of these authors’personal poems. —Name Withheld by Request (though we can tell you that it was one of Dirk’s students.) |
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