Poetry New York

(Not that I think you should be)

Erik Podhora

Reviewing Evie Shockley and Christina Davis at the Center for the Book Arts

May 10^th, 2008

Soaked and temperamental, I forked over 20 bucks (the suggested donation for 2 people) as I exited the elevator and stepped into the Center for the Book Arts. The occasion was a reading from Evie Shockley and Christina Davis. I was irritated that I would need to revisit an ATM because I failed to budget properly. I ate a lot of cheese.

The reading began right on time. That is, 20 minutes late. A man (Alexander Compos) who I apparently did not think important enough to title in my notes began by welcoming us to the print shop. Something was mentioned about one of the readers being a Columbia MFA graduate. For some reason I can’t narrate, the second introducer was on the edge of tears for the whole time she was up on the podium; especially after she finished reading one of her own poems. She said that Christina Davis has a background in philosophy and that her poems are “an invitation to think.”

Christina Davis’s poems were an invitation to think, though I think that there may have been some kind mix up in the delivery process. I couldn’t quite read them- some postman turned the body of the text into a big black fingerprint. I think the first invitation was to an informal gathering, casual dress: a panel discussion on where to stand with “art.” The second invitation was to a funeral for a man I never knew- some man that has apparently lost his name in death.

“Life is eight miles long.”

Oh, I get it now. Life is like Battery Park to the top of Central Park, but everything beyond that is afterlife.

The politics of life and death within Christina Davis’s poems were a tad too much for this soggy and irritable boy on a Saturday night.

“We have saved a rabbit, which will devour…” (your flowers).

Christina spent a lot of time talking about root words and original word meanings. I felt like I was in a pew. Christina gave me some company when she quoted a something a Nun once said to her,

“Your poems are full of doubt, and doubt is our daily bread.”

Christina’s doubt was indeed a theme. She doubts CNN. She offers “insect sized poems” in rebellion to a media she sees consuming whole lives. She doubts her own lingering on her father’s death- turning to a support group she called “The Solace Sisters.”

I cannot deny the success of Christina’s brevity, I did find myself turning inward and reflecting, in a very social setting, on my own conceptions of death and place.

Evie Shockley was introduced as a person who plays with musicality and form in language. She began without ruinous explanation with a poem about an imported character who is put to work. Evie sees herself as an “African-American” writer and all of her poems concerned “social” or “political” “issues” for “African-Americans.”

Automatically, I was taken back. How am I supposed to respond to poems that are all concerned with “racial identity” and “social-problems” that I hear about every day in every outlet of media? I thought that Evie might be invested in a project that would somehow change or alter perception of these constructs. But, she offered nothing but the correct news; an accurate account of the disenfranchisement, or gentrification, or an extermination, or the commoditization, or segregation, or neglect, or ongoing oppression of “African-Americans.”

“How many bullets does it take to kill a black man? More and more.”

Evie seems to be involved in a project that might be concerned with “building awareness.” Her voice and status as an expert in the field of sociology qualifies her for a position in this project. I am simply not interested in contributing to the project, probably because I feel that I have nothing to offer (other than an open ear).   

Maybe I was doomed from the start, coming in sick and wet and irritated. During the course of the reading my concerns shifted from these bodily concerns to more cerebral concerns. I think I may have found two projects that I am simply not interested in. I am certainly not saying that these poets are not “good” at what they do. All I can do is say,

“No, Thanks.”

At the end of the reading I learned that my donation tickets could be exchanged for artful one-page prints of the writer’s poems. I felt much better about the money I spent.