Donahue and Brasfield, Desert City reading #1

The first reading of the season in the Desert City reading series was this past weekend. Joe Donahue and Jim Brasfield read to an SRO crowd. Ken Rumble, who has assembled the series, gave great introductions, which he has posted at the link above.

(I tried my best to jot down heard lines in my notebook but may have an "a" where there's supposed to be a "the," so apologies for mistakes which I will gladly correct if notified.)

Joe has a chapbook just out on Carolina Wren. It's a continuation of his long work "Terra Lucida." He opened the reading with the first part of that work, which began in 1990. It always takes me a few minutes to settle in mentally at a reading so I didn't jot any notes about it. I think I was also clouded by the misguided idea that this work is a Duncan homage. So I'll be buying that chapbook.

Then Joe read from a new work entitled "Paradise Posts," which he told me about at dinner beforehand. Apparently he couldn't remember the title of a book that someone had recommended to him so he was googling to see if he could hit it. He googled upon a cache of therapy narratives and case studies, the linguistic surface of which caught his attention. Most of the monologues were mundane but would always have a few moments or sentences in them that stood out as different, as a moment of insight or analysis or some emotional spike affected the language. Joe started culling just these sentences and collaging them into this work. The tone of these posts vacillates between funny and sinister, but doesn't blur these. It's affecting to hear---you hear the difference between what gets said and what one hopes/thinks one is saying.

Joe finished with parts of "A Servant of God Without a Head," a new sectional work. The first part drew on Iannis Xennakis's music and seemed like movie monologues with the back halves of sentences meandering or rocketing off. Joe has a calm, methodical reading style which makes the psychic strain of these too-long sentences come across. The sentences accumulate anxiety. "A crow stares from a pole" was a line I jotted down---these kinds of concrete sentences sometimes punctuated the too-long ones. Then Joe read another part that opened with lines having to do with Stan Brakhage's films: "A paradise of frames" ... "a heaven that hurt" ... "your eyes kept you from the sight" ... which move into intimations of x-rays and cancer with lines like "this must be one of the ways the dying experience insight." A self-suspicion is behind many of Joe's lines in this work---a caution---but the line continues as a function of necessarily overcoming the suspicion, despite it, defiant.

There's an opaque layer to Joe's work on the page that's removed when he reads it aloud. Opaque is the wrong word---it's more like a scrim. His voice dissolves the density.

Jim Brasfield then read eight poems. "The Blue Cottage" is one that draws upon his travels in Ukraine. He has made two extended trips there to work on translations with Oleh Lysheha. Jim won the 2000 PEN translation award for the Harvard University Press book of these. Anyway there's a tradition of fathers painting their cottages blue when their daughter is old enough to be married. A woman two rows ahead of me gently cried as Jim read this poem in a plaintive, pained voice. I thought of Henry Taylor and C. K. Williams, hearing this poem---not their styles, but their points.

Then Jim read "McDougal Street, in memoriam Joseph Brodsky." He took a seminar with Brodsky as a graduate student, and spoke warmly of that. This poem seemed to me to be about the inexorable process of aging, and how learning can sometimes, in a moment, seem futile. After a phrasal list of ideas and considerations came the line "better to see a sparrow framed by rooftops darting over a St. Petersberg street." That line sounds like a mortal shrug to me, and leads into "this afternoon across the street from 44 Morton a tulip tree was blooming." Set them up and knock them down. The struggle to merge experience and place, to make the physical landscape the psychic landscape, is in all Brasfield's poems. Brodsky's hunted by wolves later in this poem.

The poem of Jim's that most affected me was "Woods," another from Ukraine. It posits a tension between the woods or forest and the garden, which metaphorically represents the human struggle of civilization against its lack. There's a grimness, not a cynicism, to this poem that I admired. While cultivating the ground, felling trees to make a garden, the line "we have tried to keep what is good from the forest." The last line at first seemed to me to make the whole poem a parable, which I thought might have been a mis-step, but later I realized that the line is insightful description and not didactic at all---"woods wait beneath us in the garden." Neither is it a warning, really.

Jim's poems are considered. Every line is an intentional move, and I bet that when I read them off the page I will see an as-considered conceptual scaffolding inside the poems. I'm disappointed that I hadn't set aside time to have read his work before the event.

After the reading we did the requisite loitering and buying of books before gathering at Todd Sandvik and Laura Bush's house (Laura, did you take Todd's name? I'm sorry I don't know this!) for the inaugural "Blue Door," which will be a regular after-DCSeries happening. Marcus Slease read from a long work he's been laboring over (read posts about it dated 8 and 13 september on his blog). Lately the Lucipoets have been talking about how to approach the writing of long poems. Marcus particularly is thinking a lot about how to conceive of the totality of the work even while in the middle of writing it. His work is becoming serial---I should lend him that Joseph Conte book, now that I think of it.

At the Blue Door we were also treated to a showing of Ethan Smith's paintings. I hesitate to make those pithy similes that we are all so prone to make about visual art. Nonetheless I thought the paintings were like Francis Bacon with faces---ugh, it sounds like I'm trying to be intelligent. He's definitely using Bacon's palette, and some of the same gestures. The newest painting depicts a torture, but with a variety of signifiers and symbols that complicate the scene. Shame on me for not taking the opportunity to talk with Ethan, but by that time the Maker's Mark was poured and the birthday cake was cut and the digital camera was taking shot after shot and it was so cool outside...