Jan '03 [Home]

Series/Event Review

The New Year's Day Poetry Marathons at Poetry Project and the Knitting Factory:  The Bowery Poetry Club, a Third (Hopefully United) Way?

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Four or five years ago, Jonathan Galassi of Farrar Straus & Giroux characterized open mic poetry performance as 'the karaoke of the spoken word.' Recently, he laughed out loud at this uncharitable quip, utterly forgetful that he had authored it.

If the subtextual commonality is tone-deaf imitation, then Mr. Galassi's analogy could be apt (granted inevitable exceptions). But dubious talent is only the cuff to sleeve of a neat fit. Sleevehole to body is the willingness of audience members to indulge one unsteady McCartney or Mariah after another, most of them waiting their turn for five minutes of reciprocal indulgence; the rest, loved ones or schadenfreudige devotees of reality TV truth-or-dare format self-humiliation, attend to urge performers on past sensible inhibition or sentimentality. Typically, food and drink enhance these respective pleasures.

Preceded by Fifties lip-synching (with studied gesticulation), karaoke quickly took root in our prairie grass and suburban strip mall medians. Local contests led to statewide tournaments; bar room stars became cover artists. As with spoken word opens, where there was a host, there were regulars; where there were regulars, there was community (You wanna go where everybody knows your trope). With community came reciprocal indulgence, followed gradually by familiarity, categorization, individuation, then favors, feuds, alliances, co-promotion, and, sometimes, co-dependence, insularity, and intolerance. A key distinction is that lip-synchers, karaoke and cover singers, however flawed their delivery, always use professionally viable material, whereas spoken worders use, well, their own.

The city's annual Jan 1 marathons—the Poetry Project's original and Bruce Weber's alternative—each present over a hundred performers in three-minute segments, the products of otherwise correspondent downtown communities which, unfortunately, start the year at odds with one another. Audience members overlap, but performers rarely do. True or not, the word is you risk your slot at St. Marks if you also sign on to Weber's changing weather theme—this year:  'Boiling Point.' A hot audience in winter might be worth excommunication. At the church, the chili was meatless, and the stormiest brewed lukewarm, whereas even the pouring rain didn't dampen the fire onstage at the Knitting Factory.

Composer Philip Glass and rock diva Patti Smith are fixtures on the New Year's roster at Poetry Project. Poets Kimiko Hahn, Luis Francia, and Simon Pettet have followings internationally and are great assets as well. Brenda Coultas and Erica Hunt write with serious dedication and produced thoughtful, crafted results for the early evening going. Edwin Torres combined arts, languages, and five other performers into polished, innovative theatricality. A duo, Jim Neu and Blackeyed Susan, spoofed reality TV and pandering entertainment news shows with "Live Witness," delivered in unguent televangelist style ("We're here to be what you want to see. . . . Second-person experience doesn't need to mean second-rate."). Another duo, Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov, adapted Sophocles's Electra as a vernacular summons to resist tyranny in our times and its arbitrary executive-order lawmaking. "Who will stand with me?" called the delicate Malina-Electra, descending the stage, to enter and challenge the audience of some three or four hundred, who were all ears, but no one budged.

Yet, not long before, they had cheered an anti-Ashcroft anecdotal plaint delivered extemporaneously by the coarsely convincing Reno (of Rebel Without a Pause), Nick Zedd's bloodless deadpan memo on police state protocol ("Anyone who disagrees will not be allowed on Meet the Press.  . . . Crimes of the future must be stopped before they occur."), and Emily XYZ's "Sentimental," a repeating-lines, go-forth-and-be-noble sermon to the choir. ("I am horrified by my love of comfort, / but my heart knows what to say. / I am horrified by the factory farm.  . . ./ I am silenced by the love of evil, / but my heart knows what to say: / Heaven begins where your comfort ends.") Discomfited by the universal power of Malina-Electra, the crowd noticeably relaxed when presented with predictable, dark-horse rally-mode speeches.

Penny Arcade is popular with her Roseanne-like routines ("They didn't say, 'She's gonna be a translator for the U-N!' They said, 'She's gonna be a whore!'") and Maggie Estep, too, served up ribaldry, though with a male point of view conceit, about being lured by a psycho Russian nympho practiced at exposing, not spies, but trouser flies. Yeah, Baaaaby! The real wince-maker was Douglas Dunn, barefoot, boxed, and blinded, singing, "Oh dear, oh dear. / I want to die. / I don't know why. / It's all unclear. / Oh dear, oh dear" in a quite lovely tenor. Dunn was followed by a slightly bewildered Marty Ehrlich, who quickly recovered to play—too briefly—a pro's deft saxophone recitative and thereby highlight the contrast between lackluster and gleam.

It takes great energy to organize a rally, marathon energy to organize a marathon rally. So with readings. In the twenty-nine years of this reading marathon, there have been others with more and better poetry, quite free of such annoying silliness and deadly dull rant. No doubt, there will be again.

Meanwhile, at the Knitting Factory, the flame burned on. Earlier in the day, features including Thad Rutkowski (Roughhouse, Kaya Press) and Steve Cannon (Gathering of the Tribes) traded off with open readers such as a just-in-from-Indiana Eminem look-alike. He blinked at the time's-up signal: the slow waving of the session flag, followed by an audio prompt developed by Grace Period. Begun nine years ago in a loft on Avenue A dubbed Café Nico, where food and drink were free and plentiful, this year's event spilled comfortably into the adjacent, high-ceilinged bar with wall sculpture guitars composed of tools (fans, snow shovels) and lit the other multiple spaces and levels of this club on Leonard Street. It could be the best choice yet for the alternative event's changing theme/changing venue dynamic.

The Bowery Poetry Club's New Year's Eve reading featured Anne Waldman and others. The Club, in operation just since last February and apparently optimizing its space with constant, lively events, can probably be expected to offer a third (hopefully united) way on the first day of next year.

—MH[*}