(photo by Erica Kaufman)

The Bernstein/Nathanson reading at Segue this weekend was a major poetic event. These are two writers whose work is extremely important to me, and it was a privilege hearing them read together.

Tenney was affable and charming and a little sheepish when he got up on stage, thanking me for the embarrassing introduction. You got a definite sense of his personality in the very loud Hawaiian shirt and Crocs clogs he wore to the reading, sort of tiki-lounge meets Hunter-S-Thompson. Gonzo poetry but kind of sweet and embarrassed at the same time. He read a lot of material and made joking asides between poems in a manner not unlike Shapiro but in a way that was more focused on letting you in on his writing process. As anyone who knows Tenney can testify, he talks very fast but it’s not nervousness, instead it’s more like a kind of weird, jumpy charisma. The reading, his first in New York in many years and I think the first since his books came out from Chax Press and O Books in 2005, was absolutely stunning. As I stated in my introduction, I can’t recommend his poetry highly enough and I think it’s exciting work. He began the reading with, “Madame Bovary, The National Enquirer, Capital, and The Hardy Boys, Published for the First Time Together in a Single Volume,” a funny langpo-era poem originally published in R/IFT, later in Erased Art, which displayed his sympathies with poets such as Bernstein and Perelman. This poem articulated a literal heteroglossia, collaging poems in different voices together with found texts such as newspaper articles and editorials as a commentary on the nature of authorship, as well as weird embarrassing asides such as “the hair on your balls.” The accumulation of such moments causes digression to itself become the subject as in Ashbery’s excessive figures, “like a list including itself as one of its minor items.”

Nathanson followed this poem with several sections from Home on the Range (The Night Sky With Stars in My Mouth), which frequently depict the experience of the world as a body or being inside an expansive, dispersed body: “perhaps you’re inside it differently now, the bag / face torn open in the gentle breeze, the breathing leaves.” Nathanson read these with a kind of intense, furrowed, surprised quality, half-immersed in pathos in a tender way and half-distanced, a manner of reading which allows him to move seamlessly from lyrical nature passages like the one above into  “what the fuck? Not pleasant when your head turns skeletal.” Nathanson might be one of those writers who as Bill Luoma said “write from the balls,” but the emphasis falls more significantly here on the odd, troubled relationship between the performative actions of the voice and the constantly morphing sense of a body or bodies: “ So I’m not watching snow fall down inside my body, dark and open to wind, right?” This line comes from a new manuscript “Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (Globalization),” which contains some wonderful passages miles ahead of the current discourses about appropriation:

To pound on the coffin like snow. No? I’m just saying.
Plus I’m liking Frost’s poem about the well
And this other poem by Frost I wrote it:

    Frost

These must not think on to his dark bells
Wind and the frozen lake
Think of sounds sleep and the evening
Silences, snow and lovely, darkest miles

Right now I don’t like it. I like
I’m not saying alive, I’m not saying dead

Such work proceeds as in the “Frost poem” by a kind of continually humorously surprised tone which matches the sense of proceeding by rearrangement, by new iterations in the poem’s existing vocabulary. Especially when this particular poet suddenly starts making animal sound effects in the middle of his reading. For example, in one passage here we start with “now I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world thanks Mary / M in New Mexico understanding that for me / That’s not right – but I can say it in Chihuahua, WOW WOW.” But it soon undergoes catachresis and rearrangement into “CAW. My solitary poof. I sound my barbaric poof over the yawps of the world.” I could see the audience visibly jump when he made these sound effects, because it was embarrassing and unexpected and overall quite wonderful. Nathanson invited me up at the end of his reading to finish the set with a poem that was a kind of interview between a news anchor and a George Bush character who says things like “I’m building a nation. I call it nation-building.”

Charles Bernstein’s reading was also stunning, but in the sense of an accomplished performance. He strolled onstage as a kind of announcer character, an epic persona as in a circus, one who seems at any minute about to say “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will…” He stood at the microphone for a moment while the audience welcomed him with applause, and when someone in the back of the room shouted “Grand Piano East!” he lofted back a wry “Never!” and gave a brief pause before positing a name for the suggested volume (“the tiny harpsichord”). Bernstein began his reading by calling up Dubravka Djurik, a Serbo-Croatian poet / old friend who was visiting from Belgrade. They read some translations together, about which Charles commented that initially he didn’t know much Serbo-Croatian, but upon reading the poems he realized that he understands them better than anything the president says. The texture of these pieces was very much like the more abstract versions of language poetry: “wilted faded mole says moldering.” Bernstein followed this with “The Most Frequent Words in Girly Man,” and then “Definitions of Brazil,” a collaboration he wrote with Brazilian poet Régis Bonvicino which starts with semi-plausable declarations about the actual place “Under the veneer of its veracity, Brazil is violent“ and morphs into a description of some of those qualities that might constitute “Brazil-ness,” including “Brazil stars Robert DiNiro,” “Brazil is directed by Terry Gilliam,” and of course who could forget "They gotta awful lotta coffee in Brazil." The by-now balding poet also read a poem about “lack” dedicated to Tenney on the occasion of his baldness.

Throughout Bernstein’s reading, there was the sense of him continually trying to articulate the poems as if he were not the author, doing different things with pitch, expression, and movement to prevent the listener from settling into a sympathetic mimesis of “listen to the poet read his work.” Bernstein does not always read this way, in contrast with a different sort of reading from Shadowtime in more sombre, earnest tones that I saw him give at Cue Art Foundation this past winter. But at the Segue reading I feel like I learned a lot by listening to the way in which these poems almost seemed to be coming from somewhere else, or written by a different person than the one performing them. The two highlights of the reading featured this distanced quality while engaging the reader in other ways (through humor, surprise, variety, etc). “Dea%r Fr~ien%d,” a brand new poem for the occasion, offered a satire of a number of things at once, among them the pathos of the speaker/addressee relationship and those annoying spam emails from some exotic country asking you for help or assistance. Bernstein read the poem like a very slowed-down affectless version of someone running an auction, reading all the gibberish characters out loud (so that the title would for example be pronounced “dea-percen-arr fre-circumfle-ien-percen-d”), employing elements of sound poetry as a way to disrupt the scene being created and a create a question about how to read the tone of this strange character (who signs the note “Binggo”). To perceive it as sleaziness is probably too easy a reading, but so would be to read it as a kind of playful ebullience. Definitely it was weird and entrancing. Yet another effect of this Max Headroom-like piece was to show how silly and impractical poetry appears when depicted in the context of business language (poetry is like business / poetry is not like business Venn diagram), because the proposed intimacies among poets and their proposed fame among non-poets are both such small compensation (perhaps another version of James Sherry’s comment that a piece of paper actually loses value when you print something on it):

willl snd y&ou my pi%cture
n.eed check f~irst
a.m poet wh;o l.ikes
yo.u al%%read#y.

The other favorite piece of mine that Charles read was “Brush Up Your Chaucer,” based on a Cole Porter reference and written for a meeting of the Chaucer Society. This riveting poem-lyric is written in a kind of exaggerated New York Jewish accent (“brush up ya chauwca”) which is fascinating and hilarious in performance. Again here someone called out from the audience (there’s something about Charles’ readings that encourages this, apparently) “Did the society like the poem?” Bernstein responded that they got the Chaucer references. Perhaps the best one can hope for, he said, and added “I’m not sure if the ideal audience for that poem actually exists.”

A great crowd turned out for this evening. Afterward there were drinks and a party at James Sherry’s house which was a lot of fun, followed by a dinner at the Chinese restaurant down the street. Thanks to everyone, see you next week!