3 Readers, 3 Voices, 3 Words

Ceiling at the Social Justice Center, Albany, New York (24 February 2012)
On the night of Friday, February 24th, 2012, I attended dinner at Matthew Klane's house in Albany, and I knew how to drive there because I had become lost in his neighborhood only a few days before, which had made me late for a meeting. So one piece of bad luck turned fortuitous in the end.

The reason I was at his house (for a spectacular vegetarian meal—oh, those latkes...) was to have a small celebration prior to the second of the year's readings in the Yes! Reading and Performance Series, run by James Belflower and Matthew in Albany, New York. Afterwards, I drove to the Social Justice Center, with my friend Anne Gorrick following, and I thought to myself, "Maybe this road will go through to Madison Avenue." But it didn't. It went into a McDonald's parking lot. Anne followed me, honking at me as we turned around. And that's when I remembered that I had once before tried this same trick, and come to this same unfortunate end.

Julianna Spallholz
The Social Justice Center is not much to look at, except that I enjoy looking at it, even its ceiling. And there was a good crowd there last Friday, about thirty people in total. Matthew and James shared the emceeing, and one of my favorite parts is hearing the collage poems they create out of their readers' works. First up was Julianna Spallholz, a writer of short fiction, reading from her book The State of Kansas.

She began with a short-short story (old term, I know) with a punchline, which was a good opening for the audience. She then read a much longer, but still short, work. She identified the first story as autobiographical ("True story," she appended), but the other seemed so as well. The stories worked poetically more than narratively. They exhibited almost no narrative or character development (they happened, if I can use that term, in such small spaces of time that the latter would have been nearly impossible. They functioned essentially as dramatic monlogs, maybe still lifes. And she read these with an actor's voice, giving meaning to the words.

And "giving meaning to the words" was the them of the night, and (I'll note) the real reason to go to a reading. 

NF Huth
Next up was Nancy, NF Huth by her poet's name. She read from two of her recent books, first her chapbook, "3 Words," reading a few poems from it. These poems are based on structural repetitions that change throughout the poems: repetitions of words, repetitions of sounds, repetitions of phrasal structures. And this complex set of repetitions actually represents, in a stylized form, the current speech patterns of her mother. These are beautiful surprising poems, well read, and starting with these for the first time in a reading was a good entryway, again, into her work.

She ended with a few poems from her book Radiator. These are poems I know quite well, poems I've read and heard many times, but every time I hear them, I hear new resonances and meanings deep inside their constructed complexities. These seem like simple poems, generally using simple, but decidedly muscular words, but they are quite complex, depending on multitudes of associations and an dramatically indirect method of telling. She read these with serious emotion and to good effect. The audience was entirely with her during the reading, especially with the most powerful reading she'd ever given of her poem "clank."

NF Huth reads her poem "When Dot Wonder" from her chapbook "3 Words" in the Yes! Reading and Performance Series held at the Social Justice Center in Albany, New York, on 24 February 2012.

Lori Anderson Moseman
The final reader was Lori Anderson Moseman, who read a number of poems from her book All Steel. Her poems almost all functioned as catalog poems, list poems, though they weren't quite that. They take words out of the world, though, and line them out for us to see. And she read these with great verve and grace, finding the beauty even in mechanical found language, and playing with language with a ferocity that was both beguiling and pleasurable. Of course, I couldn't quite keep up with them. I'm an aural person, but not for meaning; for meaning, I'm visual, so some of the meaning got away from me, but not the life, the liveliness of the poems.

And, in the end, I thought that Nancy and Lori had many similarities—not in their poems, which were almost diametrically opposed to one another (they were so different stylistically), but in their presences, in the resonances of their voices, in their posture, and the solid placement of their feet on the earth.

It was, all in all, a great night of readings, and it served as a book launch for the three main books these writers read from. I also recorded all of it, so you can lean back in a chair, close your eyes, imagine you are sitting in a darkened room in Albany, New York. And listen.


ecr. l'inf.