Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>Well, Ken, this is almost spooky, I almost kept looking over my shoulder "the
>Patroness?" "Who?" "Where?", so I was glad, with the voodoo at work in this, that
>you posited it so concretely at Open Mike Night, nonsense events I avoid,
>
>all the best,
>
>Rebecca
>
>
I suppose I was either out of my mind yesterday or actually IN it. I
have been to enough Opens as both participant and audience (one has no
choice but to be both) to make myself slightly sick. There's this
rather unpleasant feeling: "And I thought that *I* sucked...." when
listening to someone who writes like a pastiche of the last 10 people he
read or as though he never read a poem in his life but nevertheless
believes he has a valuable contribution to make to the history of
Western poetry. I go to Opens to try things out, just because the Open
is there and I feel a need for a "venue." Somehow the idea of sucky
Open poetry tied itself to a persona, Sukarina, who I continue to
imagine looking like some women I saw in Tribeca or SoHo: piercings in
places I don't want to see let alone imagine, tattoos, irridescent dyed
hair cut in some strange ways, and wearing a spiked dog collar (yes I
actually saw this on a subway in 1998--that and a prisoner's
waist-chain). Maybe this kind of thing is gone from the NY scene, but
Sukarina grew in my head into a kind of poetry dominatrix, albeit an
even-handed one who would do terrible fowl-like things to both women and
men if they violated the rules of the reading.
I once drove from New York to New Paltz, NY to a reading and book
exhibition and discovered that I could read ONE poem at the open. 90
miles in the rain, 90 miles back. I got up and said "I'd like to read
'Paradise Lost.'" Then I recited something I wrote which was much
shorter and not as good as Paradise Lost. The thing that both poems
have in common is that neither, as far as I know, has been optioned as a
movie (so says the IMDB).
Actually what I described sounds more like a slam than an Open. I have
been to one slam. The next slam I attend will require six strong people
who can heft a casket when I'm in it. They will slam down the lid first
lest I roll out and become a piece of performance art.
I'd like to have thought of someone better than Hermione Gingold to sing
with Truman Capote. Oh well. As for StripperGrams--years ago when I
was still married my wife's brother went into the hospital in New Haven
for some pretty intensive cardiac tests. We considered sending him a
StripperGram until we both went "Duh, because it is bitter, because it
is his heart!"
Ken
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