Kate beats me to a report on the Burning Chair reading

...which I also enjoyed, though I was feeling particularly shy in the crowd. The walk over from Fort Greene was beautiful and it was almost mild out, so I didn't mind the G not running. It was terrific to meet her--I recognized the back of her head, her braid!--and hear her read the poems I know from Learning the Language and the newer poems from her forthcoming Ahsahta book, case sensitive, and even newer work. (We could hear you fine, Kate!) And I got a better bead on Joe's poems aloud too, in a less noisy/beery atmosphere than in Austin. UPDATE: Joe's own report is here. Brenda's polyvocal arrangement promised to be interesting--a little like a Richard Foreman chorus, but way less blunt--but it didn't quite come off (for me) as successfully as it surely would have in a larger, slightly more organized performance space like the Bowery Poetry Club (without the unfortunate interruptions of sirens and the distractions of an overcrowded room) but this is no fault of hers.

Another update: Wait, I don't like how that sounds. I mean no criticism of the Fall Cafe nor Brenda & her choir, but wanted to get across that a long, complex, piece like Brenda's probably would have fared better in another setting, not that it didn't come off at all despite the noise from without. It did. Indeed, the reading was originally scheduled for the Cloister Cafe, which probably would have made that difference, venuewise. OK.

I did catch a few stray lines for you (guessing at the breaks, obviously):

"...see a building cut in half
its ribs exposed.
How vulnerable the building is."

*

"There's always that moment
with people, right?
You look back...

you can't believe
how they just
don't love you.
And how, in the minute before that,
you didn't know."

*

"If we realized the extent to which
no one understands
what anybody else really means
by anything they say, well,
you say we'd all go crazy.
But aren't we crazy already?"

*

"We learn to speak by hearing sounds
and deciding what they mean."

      --Kate Greenstreet

Brenda read from one long piece.

[I'm going to start with a statement. I hope this doesn't sound pretentions. Because that would be deadly.]

"The beautiful beautiful boys slay,
the beautiful boys they slay, she says."

"...underbrush..."

"...lagoon, lagoon..."

[Brenda, off script: Someone shoot that car please!]

[One of the male duet, off script: Too much rehearsal made us stiff!
Joe from the audience: I'm stiff right now!]

"...vestigial hind legs..."

[Stacy, from the female duet: ...MAMMARY GLANDS!]

      --Brenda Iijima

It's not so much that Joe reads fast--he actually doesn't seem all that nervous, but I know how that goes--but his poems are so short, they're harder to catch. I wished sometimes he'd read them twice. I just have to apologize now, because I didn't get Bramble or Frame and my notes are mostly banter.

[I'm going to start from the beginning, well, not the beginning.]

[That was a half-assed burp.]

[Effing. Effing FUCKING PRESS, man. ...we punched each other in the face and we're still friends.]

"In vines'

...leaves
lattticed over
the sunk shed roof

gnats or bees
--both --blur."

[After a better belch, from Brenda's table: That was a full-assed burp!]

[Joe: Some lady in a bonnet in Silliman's comment box said she was "sludge bludgeoned" by the alliteration in that poem.

From the audience: Did you punch her in the ear?]

      --Joe Massey