Like four good little stories in this, Ken, and that 90 miles to read one poem,
eek! a tie with the worst reading story I've yet heard, a woman poet about 7
months pregnant who went 3 hours by train to give a talk, arrived, and found no
one had announced the talk, so there was nobody there, or she hoped there
would be nobody so she could go home, when one person walked in a moment
or two late, and she had to give the talk anyway!
Geographical differences, maybe, but for some reason this Open Mike thing
reminds me of this Southwestern guy who would arrange readings, a couple of
poets usually, followed by an Open Mike, though that meant he would get up to
introduce the Open Mike session, introduce himself, silvery hair and all, and
then read and talk for another hour! V de Suckero was his name, if I remember
rightly,
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:53:03 -0500
>From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Sukarina the patron
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>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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