Good news about Boston poetry.
Tim Peterson is a brainy poet living in Somerville, one of the 'deckest' places for poets to find themselves in metro Boston, because it's overflowing with post collegiate synthesists and medians, cafe-dwellers, and high-end style-critics who are not necessarily affiliated with Harvard. Tim gave himself a birthday evening last Friday, inviting eight poets to read at his apartment, inviting dozens of others to join in the cake- and poetry-tasting. Readers were Xtina Strong, Brenda Iijima, Ruth Lepson, James Cook, Mark Lamoureux, Sean Cole, Joel Sloman, and me. The readings were brisk and filled with surprises. Turns out Mark, Sean and Xtina were child poets together at Marlboro College, about ten years ago. Mark read some of Sean's juvenilia -- hilarious -- and Sean, of course, returned the favor, reading elaborate and highly credible romantic verse penned by Mark as an undergraduate. Brenda, the only reader not based in Boston-Gloucester, sounded as rock-bound as most of us, though, reading from her first book, unforgivingly complex,
Around Sea, just released from O Books (Brenda grew up in western Mass., to some another outpost of Boston). Ruth read clipped and architecturally-toned entries from her dream records, which will be published soon by Potes & Poets. James Cook, whom I had not heard read before Friday's party, succeeded in taking up a number of formal strands that I associate with Olson, Creeley and others who might be identified with New England Projectivism: text as a field for argumentive experiment; unironic word-play ("What are you / righting? // What is left. Un- / orthodox tracts."); plain speech focused on communal history and psychic hesitation. Joel Sloman read pieces he called unfinished, but more often they sounded like parts of a whole (if still unfinished) suite. His first poem titled "Troglodytes" pierced me with 20 seconds of sharp pain, pain of the fun and necessary sort.
The fullest surprise, for me, was hearing Xtina Strong for the first time. Xtina is a fabulous cyberpresence in blogdom, we know. She's a regular reading-goer around Boston, as well, an attractive physical presence via her various forms of encouragement and approval. And, look, wearing layers of what you might first regard as eye-assaulting textures and colors, she is, I have to admit, the best dresser in town. Xtina ad-libbed her reading in the finest example of Wieners's force of influence. She read mostly from
Sunday Morning at the Grand, an anthology of local poets she edited and just published under the aegis of Openmouth Press [contact
chrisx@xtina.org]. This is a collection of work by regular attendees of Joe Torra's 'salon,' held Sunday mornings at the Grand Coffee Shop in Union Square, Somerville. The anthology includes pieces by Xtina, Michael Carr, Amanda Cook, James Cook, Mark Lamoureux, Chris Rizzo, Joel Sloman, Tim Peterson, and Joe Torra. The anthology itself is an important archive of what is being explored and accomplished by a significant fraction of Boston avants. I'd like to stick with Xtina's reading, however, because her first dipping into various texts by most of the contributors played well with her own collaged texts that she read after. Simply put, I interpret her reading as an occasion for an editor to show her enthusiasm for the processes of compiling poetry, hers and others'. Impossible to capture the density of her enthusiasm in snippets, but here's a sample from "Blue Perspective."
Do smoke another that comes dispersion possible
cigarette, is community hampen circulant sachet
I kept a book to loss loss of ted
ask and smoke another berrigan lost a father
cigarette? Smoke [...]
Here, again, I sense a Boston or New England sobriety, a lack of irony in Xtina's use of "loss," a lack that is further evidenced by the nonparodic work-ethic admitted in "I kept a book to loss." A hierophantic self-disapproval common to not a few New England texts pops up a little later in the poem:
Circle circle Circle Ineffable injoke dies in the utter
unspeakability
encourages others I was political under
not through desiring.
For now, I haven't the time or space to fix on the intricacies of imagery, fonts, and so forth that Xtina chooses in order to convey her winnowing and merging of language sources, but, for me, given Xtina's dexterous appropriation of graphical texts, found objects, etc., the question of
text field can no longer be merely bracketed as a concern exclusive to mid-20th century.
Another encouraging and newsworthy sign from Tim's evening of poetry and, especially, from Xtina's editorial work -- and a point that calls for more research -- Joe Torra as a generative model of teacher and poet.
