Back Story: Bukowski is dead

Indulge me awhile as I ramble on about poetry readings:

Before he was run over and killed by three shoplifters in a getaway car in the parking lot at the Upper Valley Mall a few years ago, John Deselem used to hold a weekly open mic poetry reading at the Corner Cone. Most nights, no one would show up and he would end up reading to himself and his wife. He stopped me on the street one day to tell me he had one coming up. In a remark I would later come to regret, I said, “If you catch me within a mile of that place on Friday night, please shoot me.”

Why don’t people go to poetry readings? The answer is simple; they are boring.

One of the most commercially successful poets of recent times, Charles Bukowski, would show up drunk and disdainful on the college circuit and duel with smartass English majors who thought they knew what poetry was and that what he was reading was not it. The problem for them was Buk’s stuff was too accessible. Guys who would come home from factory work in sweaty T-shirts and get drunk on cheap beer could even get it. The readings were recorded and sold on CDs with all the foul language intact, further adding to his success. Those were poetry readings people went to.

The only chance you have of attracting anyone to a poetry reading, short of disinterring Bukowski, is to include an open mike. People will come not to listen to other poets, but to offer their own brilliance. I played that game back in the 90s, both as a featured reader and as one of the peons. Once, I was invited to read at a place called the Pub of Luv in Nashville. Joe Speer, a friend of mine who had a weekly poetry show on public access TV down there, did a masterful job of promoting me. There were pieces in the Nashville newspaper and the alternative paper, the Nashville Scene, which even dispatched a reporter to the event. It was only after I stepped off the plane from New York that I learned of my newly acquired fame. Up until then, I thought I had only been renowned for bad poetry. Twelve people showed up, mostly to read their own stuff. It was all a bunch of overblown BS.

The best poetry readings are private affairs with friends sitting in a circle on the floor and a bottle of Jack or some other intoxicant being passed around, where poems are shared spontaneously with other conversation and lots of laughs. They can happen in a car on a road trip or at a kitchen table waiting for somebody’s old lady to come home from work. “Hey, man. Have I tried this one out on you?”

I once drove with some poet friends from New York to Kent, Ohio for a poetry reading that lasted from 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. It was held in an organic food restaurant across from Kent State and the place was packed to the ceiling with big egos waiting for their turn at the mic. Except for the fight that broke out when one guy jumped ahead in the order and then refused to relinquish the microphone, we had more fun on the overnight road trip and drinking all afternoon the next day in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn with other poet friends who had made the trip from Florida and Tennessee. I guess we had some inkling of what we were in for that night.

Upon being named the first Poet Laureate of Fort Lee New Jersey, noted poet August Kleinzahler was quoted as saying, "I don't like to call myself a poet. Most poets are shiftless, no-account fools." He might be onto something there.

So, on the eve of my 67th birthday, I leave you with an old poem about a shiftless, no-account fool, so long as you promise not to read it aloud at the Corner Cone or anywhere else for that matter:

The cosmos and other crap
----------------------------------------------

It is my birthday.
I am fifty-five years old.
I am sitting here
contemplating the string theory
of the universe,
the reconciliation of the theories
of Bohr
and Einstein,
the concept of the basic makeup
of all things
that can bring us back
to just one second
after the Big Bang.
It is very complicated.
It requires the comprehension
of a world with ten dimensions,
when I can barely operate
in three.

My woman storms into the room.
"Am I the only one
in this house
who will clean a toilet?
What are you doing?"

"I'm contemplating
the string theory
of the universe,"
I tell her.

"Get off your ass
and give me a hand!"

It is my birthday.
I am fifty-five years old.
Even on this day,
it is not for me
to comprehend
our creation.

-vh