TOM RAWORTH & BRIAN KIM STEFANS read tonight at Tazza in Westminster
Street in DownCity Providence.  This was a day to stay inside, at
least for someone of my sensibilities.  It was day when the covers of
my bed were a good enough room for me: rainy, windy, dark, the
remnants of Hurricane Wilma.  One after another the shreds of the
hurricanes are batting us around.

There was a quite good turn-out despite the weather. Tazza is a little
like an aquarium, with big plate glass windows looking out on
Westminster Street and orange lights studded down from the ceiling
inside.

BRIAN read first, from a new chapbook WHAT DOES IT MATTER? (Barque
2005) with a ghoulish photo on the cover involving plastic, or a shirt
slick enough with blood to be plastic, entrails, fish (I think),
fingers gouging an organ (or a fish), a lot of what seesm like
pressure, all clamped down under the peremptory and strident question
in huge brash font.

In his introduction to the reading, Brian mentioned HUGH SELWYN
MAUBERLEY more than once.  A cause for concern.  On its title page,
the chapbook describes itself as a novel.  Interestingly, Brian said
he finds the first half of the book hard to read so he read - very
well - from the second half.  He ended with the last poem in the book,
"We Leave Them Mid-Circle - With No Assurances."  Here are the poem's
last lines which I'm giving partly because I too still fret & sweat
about David Lehman:

"Books will continue to be made, and Johnson (Lionel) will still fall
from the stool,
I'll bribe you with these allusions, Auden will continue to be
chthonic in September
1932, and we'll still complain that Barbara Guest was a parenthesis
in David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, and we'll be carpet-bombed with poems,
until the big novel hits -- in which case there will still be Tom
Phillips' A Humument.

TOM, looking fine and well, began with his poem celebrating Peter
Porter, sort of.  If ever there was a poet well-named for Tom's
purposes ....  He then read his poem for the war, another rattling
rhymer.  He then read a poem from 50 years ago, his own.  I hope I'll
get to do the equivalent some day.  He read from his great big
COLLECTED POEMS.  It was moving & wonderful to see his own book in his
own hands and to know it well-used.  When he was reading the earlier
work, I was still thinking of rhyme and noticing it.  The later poems
supplant rhyme with that gustoed urgent delivery.

It actually was a very beautiful night, colors seeming more vivid in
the rain though sparse as it was night.  Tom seemed made of just a few
strokes of light color, light green, wafer, except for his face and
neck, intent on argument for, or with, poetry.
In the introduction to the Peter Porter poem, Tom mentioned Tom
Pickard building stone walls in the winter and images in the poem
echoed this.  The physicality of language was very much there in Tom's
reading.

It was worth braving the night and its wet colors to see and hear
Brian & Tom stand & deliver.  Poetry is a strange art form.  I left my
notebook in the car and felt insecure without pen & paper, thinking of
Montaigne & his memory made of paper.  If I had had my notebook with
me, this report would have been DAZZLING.  Of course.

Mairead