Marcus Bales, ‘Rule Number One’
For Linda, who said it first
If you’re going to have a reading
then no matter where you are
for a minimum of breeding
you have got to have a bar.
You will fill up all the seating,
they will come from near and far,
if the best part of your greeting
is “Why, yes we have a bar!”
But the evening will be fleeting
even if you’ve booked a star
when it’s alcohol they’re needing
and you do not have a bar.
They will freeze in scanty heating
and they’ll swelter till they char
if you advertise by leading
with the fact you have a bar.
Though it’s raining or it’s sleeting
if you offer them a jar
they’ll be aleing, beering, meading,
and absinthing at the bar.
But when poetry starts bleeding
out of every scab and scar
all you’ll see is me retreating
if you haven’t got a bar.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “For an interesting while I had an art gallery in a downtown mall in Cleveland. The mall rules said it had to be open on Saturdays — when there was no mall traffic and so no real reason to be open. So I held the Every Saturday at Noon in the Galleria Poetry Reading. Dramatically unsuccessful at first it eventually found its audience and we had a good time. But in talking about why, serving only coffee, Linda pointed out that if we could serve alcohol attendance would improve. Since it was an art gallery, and there is a tradition in art galleries of serving wine at openings, I changed the title to the Poetry Reading Art Opening and said wine and coffee would be available in limited quantities. That did the trick. It quickly became the best-attended poetry reading in the city, any day, any time. Then the authorities got wind of it and someone from the city visited and pointed out gently that while it was a tradition to serve wine at art openings in art galleries, it is technically illegal by state law, even if it is free, and they cited the appropriate code. In the end it didn’t matter much, since even the most successful poetry readings count their audiences in the low-to-mid-tens of people, and by then people had got in the habit of Saturday At Noon, and kept coming anyway even after we stopped serving wine. But the idea for the poem had formed.”
Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ (which includes the above) is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times.
Photo: “Open Bar” by Trevor Benedict – MrEcho is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
