Poetry New York

Cinco de Mayo 02008 (Fanny Howe at KGB + ODebra Twins at BPC)
Sally Zebrick

Teela and I began the evening strolling down second avenue looking for a) food and b) the KGB bar. We'd been told it was either on 12th or 8th street, and probably nowhere near second avenue. Maxim: Unless they work there or play there, no one in New York knows where anything is.

Teela is a vegan, so we found a falafel place between St. Mark's and 7th ( where are 8th? 9th? who knows?). The interior promised every delicious middle eastern food known to an American, complete with melodramatic music videos glowingly crooning from the flat screen TV. The falafel was apparently delicious, but the spinach pocket was dry, flavorless, uninspiring. I still want to go back for everything else on the menu.

We find the KGB bar: 4th street and 2nd ave, around the corner and upstairs, satisfyingly intimate mood-lighting incarnadine, densely patterned dark floral wallpaper and communist propaganda. We walk in on the tail end of Fanny Howe's reading. Poems about Ireland. Interruptions from the commotion going on upstairs upstairs (sex? fighting? marching? full body contact partying?). Fanny looks like she should be somebody's grandmother serving tea. She paints word-pictures bloody, historical, biblical, technological. Her word-patterns are multiple poems or a mélange of separate images and attitudes making up a single poem. "Things man things," "diamond minds spanked on the bosom," "sacred heart," "money like God who does not exist but is."

A collage of phrases grandiose and mundane pasted together: Ashbery; but concealing an agenda: "the scheme is organic it knows itself" - Sontag. Her more upbeat pieces contain rotting bungalows, bogs, hope in the face of inevitable suffering, a crumbling Catholicism. I feel like I'm watching a stark, politico-symbolist, Eastern European film, something with forests and socks, but it's set in the Holy Land - make that Northern Ireland. However she wraps it up I like it. Last reading of the series is 7:30pm May 12th and I hope that I make it on time.

The poetry has ended so there's nothing to do but drink vodka - shot glasses filled all the way up to the brim - and investigate the happenings on the second floor. Turns out it's a play rehearsal - playboy meets Amazon women to audience's hilarity and his humiliation; body slams (?) ensue. Opens on May 11th, price unknown.

Revelation: Liquor is expensive in New York City. Solution: Buy a bottle of cheap whiskey and some coca-cola on the way to the O'Debra Twins Show and Tell.

Scene 2: The Bowery Poetry Club

I chat it up with some ex-pat Alaskans (a singer-songwriter would-be writer/author of children's books and a classically trained actor making it in the big city) and then the Leprechaunquistadors take the stage, first several and then many musicians tearing away, a melodic cacophony, a massacre of sound; the party is happening on the stage (ARRREEEEBA!). Two six-packs of PBRS make it to the musicians (I can only make out about five of the twelve or so blaring La Bamba, but it doesn't matter, and saxophones are a feat of engineering) and I would be up there dancing, but I have to pee. The lead singer (a Cuban? woman) looks like she should be the star of her own comic book - gay punk street wear with a hint of Hasidic, but the definition is all in her face, grimacing with passion. Pure, powerful voice. Also present are a violinist bearing a resemblance to Vincent Cassel, a thin red-headed woman playing the accordion, various other ordinary and fashionable youths. And saxophones.

This is a drunken 80s party medley, complete with splattering beer and paper towell confetti. (Rule #1! If you spill on the stage, you must help clean the stage. Rule #2! No placing of genitals on the O'Debra Twins unless you're specifically asked to do so.)

Yes I am dancing by this point, and the Leprechaunquistadors are way, way too good an opening act.

Then the open-mic show, performances selected at random, six minutes apiece:

#1 Alabastar - Southern old-time sailor spoken word artist with a guitar. Sings both sweet and silly and growling Tom Waits style, "blood-red bottles so scary - see my capillary bursting across the sky-y-y." A very clean-cut cartoon character play-acting NUTSO.

#2 John King - Funny sheepish old man voice, begins with a public service announcement to keep it in the pants. Stuffs potato chips in his back pocket (fiesta!) - does the election make a difference? Very weird. Louv sitting next to me is not reacting-- doesn't he like Gummo? Where is the communal weirdness love? How is the night supposed to be enjoyable if we all can't laugh along? Where is the booze, or failing that, when will the buzzer ring? Oh. Now.

#3 Natalie - Turning twenty-seven, a very cheerful Nancy Sinatra in a short red dress (buxom), fishnets, and black leather boots. Burlesque without stripping but with a lit match and a cartwheel! Cartwheel!!!

#4 Michelle Leona - Lady with an accordion, "'asshole-ache' is when you lose your heart and your asshole at the same time." She sings "The Golden Ass" in a beautiful warm mellow voice, circa the 1960s New York folk scene. "Why not just take all of me my love?" Mythic imagery, sex, feces. Theatrical: "no touching! feel me - no touching!" "epic as in really really really fucking long." This is how you put that Classics degree to work. One of the O'Debra's called her performance "mesmerizing." Yes.

#5 - #6? #3? #5 - Much confusion as to who performs next, names pulled out of a plastic pitcher. More drinking. Two men go up on stage and drop trou' in exchange for tequila.

#5 Jeff Dickinson - returning to the stage where he had just earned his tequila (serendipity!), dons a black cowboy hat and a guitar and is too loud into the mike, which means my buzz is getting dim again. A rambling, pointless story about a chess tournament that ends in a horrific pun. Guitar song "days go by without you" - nice voice, nice interlude. (Liquor is really not cheap enough to facilitate a thoroughly escapist open mic experience). However - he does have a delicately twanging, scratching and catching voice.

#6 Tony Someone - A story about a blind woman. Crude, not funny. Moving on to Helen Keller tourism in Alabama - "come see what she can't" is funny. Extending the joke = not. Leaves the stage.

#7 Joey John - Computer vocal happiness. "We are so happy about being Joey John." I look up from scribbling TOSCANO WOULD DIG THIS to see that Joey John is two men speaking in alternating rehearsed mono/dialogue - glasses over eyes and in hand. Penis drunken run please, "Bullshit Housing" chorus blues. Improv? Word association? Sketch or poem or song, it energizes the audience. Choral repetition of "bullshit housing" alone would do that, but the whole act is a joy to watch.

#8 Master Li - low rumbling traintrack voice, breath - lights - music. He performs with some kind of mystic juggling thing in space. Epiphany - the followers of Buddha. "I developed this... gigantic ego... because I am Master Li. What do I do? I breathe on stage." Master Li is the Epcot Space Mountain roller coaster version of meditation.

#9 The Fools - first thing I notice is the bass-player with a painfully stretched smile. Two women, pop singer-songwriter stuff and I want to listen. Very spare, artfully so, fulfilling - they unplug abruptly and it's ENCORE! "Crazy lazy" driving rhythm something between Cat Power and Maria Muldaur. "Don't be fooled by your own lies."

#10 John Cohen makes jokes about marriage, shares a penis anecdote. Is eroticism funny without taboo?

#11 Angry Bob - very large, very loud man insults the audience in a Russian accent, expresses extreme intolerance mainly for sodomites and yuppies. One of the O'Debras looks severely wearied by this act.

#12 Rummy (?) Venice - Black man Q&A. The audience, having been deafened/muted by Angry Bob, springs into enthusiastic participation. "Are there black Mexicans?" "Yes we call them Jamaicans." Vote Obama. Apparently Iron Man is worth seeing.

A break to prepare for drunken twister. Many depart to catch some Zs. I would stick around out of curiosity, but this party has reached the stage where one must either get really fucked up or else drop out. After half a smallish bottle of cheap whisky and three shots of vodka, I decide that I'm tapped. Louv and Brian have already left; Teela and I decide to call it a night.

Post-intoxication revelations:

1 - In Olympia, Seattle, New York, or Tennessee, fifteen or twenty-three, social gatherings still entail the projection of mass fantasy. It's never - or rarely - what you want it to be. Effort expended (and substances consumed) trying to stretch reality to match the ideal.

2 - Conversation en route to the subway: Poets are not only obsessed with sex but obsessed with their obsession with sex.

Subway: A very square man with a bow-tie, physically interesting like a silent movie villain.

The tracks sing spirit siren screams. Take-out. Earbud. Crossword. Public awareness.

#13 Broadway-Nassau - A girl sprints to the A-train door as the train pulls away: knuckle-biting angst; this Cinco de Mayo is not the greatest day in her life.

Subway is: whispering on the edge of hearing, spreading puddle of water droplets beyond the Service Change caution tape; pneumatic hissing; echoes, whistling; poetry student pacing deliberately; a man in blue-white hooded fleece pajamas, face like a ghost; guard with waistcoat watch-chain uniform; damp peeling ceiling.

The subway is... F train making A stops; A train making F stops. "Is the G train running?" "Yes it is."

Over cliff and cavern, crevasse and canyon, helter skelter... Home.