Poetry New York

As poets interested in both written and performance poetry, Toscano and Prevallet go about tying the realms together in different ways. While Toscano begins his performance by immersing the audience in his words, Prevallet prefaces her presentation with a method for the audience to experience the performance. The presentations achieved different dramatic results, but in both there is sense of immersion.

As Toscano read what he called “an urban poem” entitled “Sublunary Markings of Autumn (In)” the audience met the Lower East Side of Manhattan in words. He rolled his tongue over syllables and varied the tone of his speech emulating voices of people one might meet out on the street. He moves between these voices and the objects one may see, like flattened chewing gum. The non-stop movement of the words over slightly varied surfaces gives the performance an image-like quality of a walking down the sidewalk. We find ourselves walking across streets, sometimes against traffic.

Kristin Prevallet describes her poetics as a “fragmented system of believing.” In her reading there was a sense of an inner dialogue; an assertion, pause, and response. She read from I, Afterlife which was a response to her father’s suicide. Prevallet came to stand in the presence of this void after trying to “spackle” over it and fill it with objects in a shrine. She constructed her shrine through listing of all the things, physical objects that is, and constantly re-arranging them. Even after the reading of the list, the images of the things lingered in the eyes. With these images, the reflection that comes in her essay forms draws the reader inside of the performance. She mixes poetry, essay and short story. She is able to share her time and energy spent with the void of her father. The audience begins to experience the void as she does; that only through being present in the face of these voids can we have a sense of completion.

Toscano engaged his audience with pulsing rhythms in his speech, varied vocal tones and an undercurrent of tasteful social commentary. As he read the reader was immersed in the language by a varied and exciting vocal performance. Prevallet’s performance hinged on the audience’s careful attention to the language; her performance engaged readers by drawing them into the realm of the text. Prevallet’s performance was much closer to the experience of a traditional narrative in the sense that in the performance, there was no world outside of the text.

These writer/performers succeed by drawing the audience into the realm of their work. Toscano succeeds in making his work accessible through a strong vocal performance. His presentation is a visceral experience. Prevallet succeeds by enticing the audience into the world of her story; a cognitive experience. Both performers incite an instinctual, perhaps even emotional closeness with their work.