21 January 2020. Tuesday night at the Poetry Foundation for an “Open Door” reading, in which two local poets/teachers invite students of theirs to read as well. There are 20 to 30 people in the audience, which seems tilted towards the friends of the younger readers. It’s a clear night, mostly dry, with icy sidewalks. The readings at the Poetry Foundation have generally in my experience started anti-socially on-time, but this one began a civilized ten minutes late. There’s a podium with a microphone on a stage in front of windows that look out onto the courtyard. Latecomers must shamefully walk past these windows behind the readers.
Patrick Durgin is the first reader. He apologizes for his “unintentionally solemn” voice; he is just getting over a cold. By way of introducing his own work, he explains that he’s been working on a series of exegeses, which he says is an archaic term for an explanation or elucidation of a text. He, however, has been writing defective exegeses that are subjective when they aren’t supposed to be. His first one is about Lorine Niedecker, “abrupt and vaguely pretty;” “she worried about the assumption of self-consistency implicit in class consciousness.” One exegesis is about King Tubby, and it starts “I use metadata the way King Tubby uses tempo, to segment and condense demographic scales.“ He quickly realizes that he needs to explain who King Tubby, the “inventor of dub,” is, and why the line makes sense. King Tubby invented “things that didn’t sound like music at the time.” There’s another one for Sonia Sanchez, who calls him “brother Patrick.” There’s another for the hardcore band Side Action: “I have wanted poetry to be at least as momentous and fleeting.” He reads some lines I like: “Sometimes a concert means you think of the recording, sometimes it means you never have to hear it again…I pray for revolution…What is not a false equivalence in the face of social privilege.” The poem he reads last is an exegesis of the equator: “The moonlight in the valley is before and after history…All things are possible among the ruins, the money can flow.”
Patrick then introduces the next reader, Alex Karsavin, his student at SAIC. He says that Alex always sits quietly during class before asking the one question he has not prepared for. Taking the stage in a leopard print eyepatch, Alex says they are going to read a combination of love poems and eco poems. “The birds speak in canticles, sky full of linguistics,” “flesh turning to spiced fruit.” There’s a poem about a live fish market, and some short-lived difficulties with the podium microphone. “The fish the fish the fish not as you wish, all too human surplus.” A poem ends with a term from computational linguistics, and Alex explains “that’s a term from computational linguistics.” There’s a poem written in Durgin’s class that is a series of notes on Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). Alex reads a poem called “Unearthly Bonds,” “but that is kind of a bad name.” Another poem has some lines I liked about “spurious longing scattered blue by gases” and “a precarious self-sufficiency, a series of gro lights.”
As soon as Alex finishes reading and leaves the stage, Kristiana Rae Colón, standing in the back of the crowd, starts reciting her poem “a remix for remembrance” into a handheld mic: “This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement,/ who press creases into jeans.” She explains that she is a teaching artist in CPS and that she wrote this poem for some students of hers. These particular 8th graders, she says, gave her the business every week (“they didn’t want to write no metaphors”) but then surprised her by asking her to read something for their 8th-grade graduation. She wrote this poem in response and dedicated it to the “folks who are going to design and implement our liberation.” Then she reads a portion of the poem “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black” by Margaret Burroughs. After receiving a tepid response from the crowd after asking if they know who Burroughs is, she explains that the poem is “very canonical.” Then she reads her remix of the Burroughs poem that was commissioned by the MCA. After explaining the background she apologizes and says she usually doesn’t do this much banter. “Heaven surely is a white white place”; “this neoliberal wonderland that refuses to see colors.” “How do I tell soil that he’s handsome?” Then she reads from a play that she describes as an Afrofuturist dystopia about a cheerleader squad that overthrows the hypermilitarized campus security. The main character, two of whose monologues she reads, is a teaching artist for the evil administration whom the students gradually come to realize is on their side. “Discipline your energy to rise inside your matter…This is where you trust yourself deeply…you are a circuit of your ancestors’ wisdom.”
Kristiana introduces her student, the next reader, Neiyah Villegas, who is a freshman at Kenwood Academy High School, and a member of their pom squad, which Kristiana didn’t realize until tonight. Villegas reads into a mic on a stand in front of the stage as she does not think that she is tall enough for the podium. Villegas’s first poem is built around the anaphoric repetition of the phrase “I’m from,” like “I’m from asking to sleep over a friend’s house and my parents asking all about their backgrounds.” The poem ends, “I’m from me.” The next poem that she reads she co-wrote with her slam team from 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. It’s about racist America playing peek-a-boo: “America you hide behind homicidal hands…you treat us like weeds…your mouth is full of outdated excuses…America enough peek-a-boo: you play too much.” Her last poem is an ekphrasis of panel 53 of Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series: “they look expensive.”