Whew! What a reading. Even I was summoned out of my thousand years sleep for this one. Propelled of course by the siren call of one M L Obadike. Lately, if I am not stumbling mindlessly in to work, I lay in bed and contemplate the void and lose myself in fantasy or torture myself with all the THINGS I HAVE TO DO. After some fumbling around in time, some hours later I got an email from Mendi about this reading. Ah! The prospect of seeing all these extra-planetary bodies was too much, so after some subway fumbling I found myself in the Bowery Poetry Cave. Saw Christopher Stackhouse and Holly Bass. Both poets are beautiful, first of all. John with his casacading mane of locks seemed taller somehow, and reading from some older and newer works, went first. A catalogue of space and time, of gay black male life and politics, and the nature of reality and desire. I have to say in my quirky mind I got stuck in a loop of "Mirror in the Bathroom" when he read a line that referenced English Beat. Ah, how I loved them... let me indulge that tangent for a moment: "Mirror in the bathroom/I just can't stop it/Every Saturday you see me/Window shopping/Find no interest/ In the stacks and shelves/Only in the reflection/ Of my own sweet self self self self self..." Ah yes. Of course I also love them for "Stand down, Margaret/ Stand down, please/ Stand down Margaret..." telling Margaret Thatcher to get the hell out of office... Anyway, enough of that. Oh, and I wanted to metion that you must know that John was part of The Darkroom Collective, along with Natasha Trethewey, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kevin Young, Sharan Strange, Major Jackson, and Vera Beatty. An important part of literary history I try to pass on whenever I can. If I am missing anyone please let me know!
Then Julie Ezelle Patton took -- and I mean -- TOOK -- the stage. I had only ever read her work on the page, and wrote about her in my thesis on black women's experimental poetics. Erica Hunt played one of her CDs for us in our poetry workshop, too. But nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see. First things first. I went to the bathroom and played around talking to some friends in the back of the club, and when I went back to my front row seat, Julie was on stage, crouched behind an overturned table, spreading her papers around on the floor. Her salt and pepper locks were wrapped in a thick, white scarf and she wore these amazing brown and black harlequin pattern tights and calf length winter boots. i couldn't stop looking at her tights. She must have noticed because later she said, "like my tights? italy." I think she was on her way there. Tonya Foster, the curator of the reading series, stood and read Julie's bio, and after a little while, Julie began to punctuate Tonya's intro with some shakes of one of those electronic kid toys that make noise when you move them around. It looked like a mini Gandolf staff in red plastic. Too many things. Julie began the reading from behind the table, first making a little altar of some photos on a stand and an open journal that looked as though it had been through the wash in someone's pocket. Then she SANG to us, from the floor. Sometimes people singing poetry can be really really irritating. But her voice is so crisp and exact and clear and allows you to follow her manipulations of words and sounds and ideas through all their complexities. I found my mind working so fast and feeling the same pleasure in the center of my chest that I feel during exquisitely wrought musical compositions. Then she improv-ed some, riffing on the BWC sign behind her, and was joined by an excellent stand up bass player. One of the fave pieces of the night examined the current political situation by taking apart the names of the chief players...she did things with condeleeza rice's name (con da legions, among them) that I can't even explain but it was amazing.
Then we all went out to dinner afterwards at Planet One, a great vegan place in the East Village with lots of Caribbean/African cuisine, and a good time was had by all.
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