Yesterday at the Liar...

...we all enjoyed some very good readings, as expected. When Shafer announced we were about to hear some poetry and "if that bothers you, you should be moving along," the full house bar crowd stayed put. (The chance attendees at the FFL are generally pretty good about hanging out, actually. This is Shafer's peculiar gift and one of the main charms of the series, bringing poetry to the nonpoet peoples.)

Justin celebrated his birthday by reading from his chapbook, and also from his manuscript-in-progress, including this sestina, with its remarkably weighty teleutons, and this prose poem spoken by a diffident dissident from the chapbook:

HOME AGAIN

Makeshift landmines were all the rage. For reasons beyond my control, people had it in for me, set up mines on a stretch of road close to home, where they knew I'd have to go, eventually. Driving, I hit one. A couple tires blew out, the hood flew off. I was going to hit another. So I jumped from my car, which proceeded to blow up, completely.

I found my mother. She was concerned, a little, sent me to live with a family that I soon discovered also had it in for me. Their grievances were most likely a result of circumstances beyond my control. They had the same affinity for explosive devices as the people at home, planted them around the house. The furniture was arranged to limit alternate routes around the mines. The family also put mines in my bed as I slept. I became adept at never fully sleeping.

Nearing total exhaustion, everything out of focus, they put me in a little room and made me watch videos of people in the past who had acted like me. They were suffering similarly. Landmines were featured prominently. I, however, was faring much better, I thought. Then a bell rang in the room where the video was being taped. Those people looked toward that sound. The room I was in gave way to city streets. Mines were going off all over the place. Another explosion. Then another. Whatever they wanted me to confess, I was nearly ready.

Chris Tonelli read a couple of these from his new chapbook of self-described "fart jokes" which "veer toward the toilet." He's half kidding when he describes them that way, I think, though admittedly a few do live up to that hype. The other work he read was longer, bird-studded, elegant, and less jokey. I liked both modes, which sometimes come together in the same poem. For instance:

IMAGISM (THE LILY ON THE WINDOW SILL)

I fucking love
the lily on the window sill.

It's yellow.

That might be my favorite from Wide Tree, though it's hard to choose. The top-heavy title is deflated by that "fucking" in the first line, and the -ows in window and yellow just seem perfect to me, as do the doubled ells in lily, sill, and yellow. Hey, look, Chris has a new blog.

Carol Novack was the only reader I hadn't heard before and she made me laugh very hard with this line from her short story "Blah Blah":

"By night he looked enough like Elijah Wood to get me greased."



After the reading she confessed that he didn't know who Elijah Wood was, actually, only that he was popular with younger women. (Her character was about 30.)

You can read some of Carol's work at her blog, and find links to other pieces in her sidebar here.