MY BOMBASTIC HOT TAKE ABOUT OPEN READINGS CIRCA 1989 -95

 

I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming in a close second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous stream of encrypted banality. 

Not to grind this axe too long or too loudly, what is most striking about the assembled grossness of these overreaching testaments is that no one seems to have had an interesting take on the muse-inspiring incident that happened to them. Too often, the epiphanic moment drives the earnest amateur deep into the Archive of the Already Said Too Often. This dampens my enthusiasm for the notion that an introduction to good poets and their work will, by default, improve and hone the attributes of a readership that would likewise enjoy contemplating existence in unique combinations of metaphor and simile.Rather than broadening the perspective, as one might hope, many become entrenched in bad ideas. It's like a cold one can't quite get rid of, I guess, finally going away after rest and a vacation from taking one's seriousness too seriously. But the bad taste also acts like a virus, incubating for quite a while and affecting the senses in ways that seem to produce an irreversible tendency toward grandiloquence, truism, bathos, and rugged individualism.Some of this is inevitable in the course of being human, with our conceit that we are sensitive creatures with something to say. God knows I am an insufferable jerk when it comes to the sanctity of my own poetry, which is, let us say, looking increasingly hokey as I get older. But if poetry is doing its job, the reader should have the sense that some fact, independent of the narrator's expectations, has been acknowledged, and that the speaker is ready to change their thinking.Yet another reason I gave up doing public readings as a matter of habit: my good poems are few, really, and repeating them bores the fuck out of me.The sort of tract many readers come across in airports and on the shelves of bookstore self-help sections resembles a poem less than it resembles knotted strings of refitted clichés, lacking irony or circumstantial variation.

These are things one says after an accompanying string of disasters and disappointments that work not to comprehend experience, and perhaps gain some perspective on why things don't go according to plan, but rather to rationalize and reinforce one's attitude and manner of moving through the world. When all is said and done, Frank Sinatra said the same thing, but with more style and less pop-psyche cant: “I did it my way.” Not that Sinatra's cratered croon makes this a desirable way to go through life.We are who we are, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in.One is powerless to control the final outcomes of events, but within the larger picture we can change our actions. We can change the way we think. We do, more often than not, influence the results.

Such poets come across as defeatists in a Hemingway ammo belt.Poetry is fun when it is good.This was not good.Those who write poems, I think, are obliged to write the poems they are able to write, whatever their style, and they ought not be surprised when they are criticized for using clichés and glittering generalities in place of real craft or inspiration. One's innermost thoughts, of themselves, are often not interesting as poetry. Whether the young poet admits it or not, they have a responsibility to express their inner lives in a fresh way that is interesting to readers in the outer world.Small thoughts are perfectly fine. One need only inspect Emily Dickinson, or the imagist poems of Pound or Williams, for examples.

Even the “less than earth-shaking” poem has a bar to reach; it should nonetheless be exquisitely expressed. Those who participate in their lives are not passive. They are engaged with them.Even the shy, weak, infirm, modest, and laconic among us take proactive roles in the directions we take and assume some responsibility for them.Most of all, there is the capacity to remain teachable, to learn from experience and change behavior and mindset. This is what keeps people interesting and useful to their fellows.Those who refuse to change their ways, who use experience merely as rationale for reinforcing ineffective methods of coping with existence, are dull and self-infatuated much of the time. It's safe to say that they are poor on social skills and social cues both. Not you nor your friends like being around these personalities, yet somehow they keep showing up at the readings and other occasions where only the proper people are in attendence. But that's the life were stuck with. Boring people, bad luck and a variety of bad meals served in pricy cafes are the the existence we have. Such is the material the best poetry is made of.