We are gathered in an ancient Maryland apartment, a bevy of undergrads staging their final reading of the year. While the spring dawns anew, the sun is setting on some of the poets here this evening; many are graduating seniors who are moving on with their lives, scattering across the country (and in some cases, the globe) in the next few weeks to pursue jobs, projects, expeditions. Some will not see each other again for months, perhaps years. An atmosphere of tension and loss is glazed over by easy access to alcohol and an overabundance of bawdy jokes, but it won’t last; we are the last of the Azphadim, the poetic society which has come together tonight to say our impromptu goodbyes.
The narrow room is dark and breathless, laced with wisps of smoke and packed with more bodies than it should ever have attempted to accommodate. I perch amidst the ongoing fumbling for seats and wine, occupying a position of relative safety atop a handcrafted maple barstool. Others have cobbled together cushion-thrones, makeshift bed-sheet hammocks, a thrift-shop loveseat occupied by a bearded gentleman of singular proportions. We are eagerly ensconced, fingers thumbing over well-worn pages, tapping out spidery rhythms on touch screens, faces illuminated by the sickly ghost-glow of Facebook, waiting.
Somewhere in the blackness, an unbidden voice stutters to life, a biology major stumbling into staccato measures on the fragility of marine life, a high, thin alto beset with shivering pauses and tremulous texture. To describe the work as “haunting” might be generous, but there is a palpable sense of fear, of prophesied absence, an anxiousness which tears at the poet’s throat and causes the hands to shake. It chills the warm, mulled-wine haze of the room, snaps the last of the kitchen stragglers to full attention, everything stills to catch the edge of her receding syllables. The poem lasts far longer than a transcription might indicate, and indeed, I have none to provide; the bravery of the poet in opening the event extends no farther than the chambers of her coterie, and she was unwilling to surrender a copy.
As it fades, there is a murmur of applause, congratulations are distributed, more wine is passed. We return to waiting, heat sinking back into our bones. This is the way of things here; each poem is allowed to find its own space in the evening, its own breath. Someone spills a plate of stuffed mushrooms, overflowing with roasted garlic and, I am assured, at least three cheeses; there is a chorus of “fuck”s, over which begins the next reading, Nathan Meluvor’s account of a romantic wounding, a homewrecking of some import. The fare of the main text is standard, a duel of swords, fountaining ichor, his stock banter of violence:
“The heart spasms on my blade,
Ribs crack and rend,
Lungs shake and gape.”
…but ends abruptly, breaking from the established pseudo-meter, with:
“My hand may have held the blade aloft;
May have aimed that devil’s kiss
That left such an awful wound.
But it’s forging was your craft;
Your indifference a furnace,
Your distance, the bellows’ wind”
The last two lines struck me as somewhat poetically redeeming to an otherwise stale and overt narrative of “this whole mess was your fault”. Still, the theme of loss pervades the evening, and I do not help with my addition of Baltimore, followed some time later by Colombia. None of us want to leave, and our poems wrench and tear at the notion of separation, sudden fears blossoming into stanzas and rhyme. The event is the most scripted kind of rawness; the trading of tearful in-jokes, last words on arguments beaten into poetic cadence, a solitary marriage proposal, delivered half in jest, all in seriousness. Sheltered academics peer out into the unforgiving glare of the job market, and retreat quickly to their couches to scribble frantically about their suffering. I am one of them.
The evening breaks up slowly, splinter groups and trysts escaping first, followed by the job-havers and the shut-eyes. Eventually, only the wasted and the washing-up are left, one beleaguering the other. This, at least, is familiar.