An Ending to a "Reading"

Diego as poemsong (Chicago, Illinois, 26 August 2011)A week ago Friday, I gave a poetry performance in Chicago. (I've dispensed with the term "poetry reading," since I read, recite, sing, invent on the spot, dance, scream, pace, talk, and whistle.) I was one of a couple of performers, the other being Steve Roggenbuck, who read, but also sang and danced. Ours was "Experiment # 49: Full-Body Poetics" in the the Red Rover Reading series. The audience was small (some being no more than three feet tall) yet not tiny. And it was a good experience, one I would have written about by now if I hadn't been focused on rescheduling my flight out of Chicago, which was cancelled because of Hurricane Irene and if my return to New York didn't focus me on overseeing providing assistance to government agencies dealing with, by far, the largest numbers of records disasters, some huge, that I've seen in two decades of doing this work. And maybe I would have done something sooner if the video of my performance was viewable on anything besides the handheld device that captured it, because any downloaded copy of the show plays, but only with loud static throughout.

So, tonight, I'll remember two things from this performance. The first is Diego, and the second is his father Carlos, both of whom came to my performance with my friend, the Bolivian poet Veronica Lucuy Alandia, who did a great job capturing video of my performance, even though the machine decided to mangle the audio a bit. What I remember from the show is that Diego moved to the front row so he could see me better, that he sat there watching me with a huge smile on his face, and that he played with the projected final slide of the visual part of my show and, in doing so, made himself into a poemsong. And I remember that his father Carlos, also from Bolivia as was his wife Veronica, changed his own son Diego into a poemson.

And, together, those were the best results I'd ever indirectly engendered from a performance of mine. As Jen Besemer so poetically said, at the end of a little written recollection of that night, "we are phrase and phoneme and pixel and pigment."

Diego as Carlos' poemson (Chicago, Illinois, 26 August 2011)<i>ecr. l'inf.</i>