Poetry New York

Christina Davis &

E. B. Shockley

The Center For Book Arts

Crowded in between drawers of Garamond Bold 60 Pt. type and Trylon 48 are rows of chairs where everybody drapes their coats to dry off.  When the reading finally starts, Alexander Campos, The Center For Book Arts Director, thanks everybody for coming through the pouring rain to be there.  But the reading hasn’t started in earnest, he introduces another woman to provide further introductions to the actual poets who instead reads a group of epigrams about radishes to which the audience laughs appreciatively and patiently.  They’re self-consciously cute, like something that would hang in the ferry terminal at the Bainbridge Island Ferry. Finally she calls up Christina Davis with appropriate sound-bites: “poetry concerned with essentials,” “small houses for thinking,” “quickness of a struck match,” and a Rilke quote.

She reads each poem with a quiet simplicity and a profound weight.  Though I’m not so sure the poetry was actually profound.  Here in the reading the poetry fails to carry itself, her voice gives each word too much credit.  But after ten minutes you begin to hear more poems that hint at a great loss. She makes references to losing her father, and a group of women call the Solace Sisters who have each lost someone important in their lives.  

Next E. B. Shockly is introduced, and she uses the same quiet, profound tone to read her poems, but her poetry contains more violence, more horror and injustice, and more humor. There’s a sonnet about Stanley Williams III (the founder of the Crips), a murder victim “(dust’s unholy reunion with the Earth,)” & New Orleans. There’s a lot of poems about New Orleans, and a line about rigged levies even brings a scattered applause. (“How many NYPD bullets does it take to kill a black man? More and more and more.”)  She seems trying not to be pessimistic, in fact she seems like she tries very hard not to be, but that's her bent, when she’s most interesting, and her poetry suffers when she resists her glass-half-empty humor.  She even throws in some casual apologies for her reading, like she’s wasting our time, but we are there to see her, so we can forgive her her self doubt.