Modernism/modernity

Errata

This past summer, I went up from London to Cambridge with friends to hear James Tate and John Ashbery read poems at Jesus College. This was a poetry reading competing with the finals of the World Cup, so I was not surprised to find a small audience of thirty or so, many of them poets themselves, some of them joking a little about the scheduling conflict in the way that one jokes about the inevitable with a proper groan. Of course all of these people are here for a reason, I thought, or rather a variety of reasons. These would include interest in and curiosity about the event and the desire to hear poems previously encountered on the page. Maybe some had heard one of the Americans read another time and wanted a chance to witness and hear another performance of familiar work. Tate had not been announced as part of the program so the fact of his poetry having recently acquired a British publisher is unimportant, but Ashbery’s latest book was also just out and thus there was new work to be heard, though in some twenty years of poetry readings I have never heard this used as a reason for getting out to one. A sense of duty to poetry itself—that august art besieged by apathy—was also a factor, perhaps, if unexpressed, and for two or three in the room the need to honor old friendships or literary alliances.

Adding to the diffuse atmospherics of old stone and wood in the dimly lit room that overcast evening was a reading lamp atop the table up front, the sole source of non-natural and thereby nondwindling light. After a word or two by way of introduction from Kevin Nolan, it [End Page 153] occurred to Tate, at about the same moment it occurred to me, that he was destined to conduct this reading sitting down behind this lamp. “I’m used to reading standing up but I guess I’ll just sit here,” he said, or something like that, the awkwardness of this arrangement for him obvious. That awkwardness was produced by the configuration of a site which could only suggest cloistered or private, subvocal reading. Tate’s momentary defeat in contemplating this setting became the primary content, the most lasting impression, of his reading as I sat in the back not quite able to see his face, just a little anxious for the main attraction to come on.

My mind wandered to memories of other readings. Just a few months earlier one of the British poets present in the room, Tom Raworth, had read at my own institution in Ohio to a much larger undergraduate crowd mostly required to attend. He’d begun with a poem called “University Days,” which in its print incarnation has the words “this poem has been removed for further study” set in the lines of a narrow box, as if a museum placard. He’d ended with “Poem Poem,” which consists of the slow and tinkling tones of a Parisian music box playing the punched out words of the title, the low tech music strangely eerie and beautiful moving out across the carpet—even while I knew it might have been motivated by a similar critique of the confining frames of the “poetic.” Between “University Days” and “Poem Poem” there had been a long poem consisting of syntactically fragmented sentences of quotidian observation and proposition, read at a speed that helped the poem gather a force and affect that one undergraduate, noting also the poet’s dress, accent, and slightly reddened complexion, tried to capture for me by saying, “Wow, he’s really angry.” Having read this poem and played his machine, Raworth quietly added that he found most poetry readings boring and left the podium.

Sitting there in Cambridge, then, I was remembering those words and thinking about better and worse poetry readings I’d been present for, trying to find some...