Poetry New York

Erik Podhora

Reviewing the Evergreen Reading Series- Charles Bernstein & Julie Patton

May 5^th, 2008

Julie Patton began her reading by sitting down on the steps to the Bowery Poetry Club’s stage. She took the mike from its stand and the next thing we hear is, “Uh-oh, uh-oh.” Her first poem is an excerpt from work that was inspired by an interview with her mother.

Objects filled the room: water-colors, oils, “true-hue,” magenta blue, named colors, named people, quotes. Sitting in the presence of this poem is like experiencing what some call a psychedelic trip, in that you have no idea what will come next, but there is a unifying theme or sequence to the event that ties it all together. Patton’s reading brings us into a strange and other-worldly space. As she began reading, it was as if the flood gates had been let open and we were all immersed in the language. Her infrequent pauses were not so much dramatic as they were opportunities for us to come up for a gasp of air.

Julie defies classification, especially classification from a novice like me. All I can say is that her poems were an eclectic mix of memories, observations and what one might call philosophy.

“Gotta take the blues with me

Make sure they have roots.”

She challenged my conception of language by juxtaposing street lingo, regional dialects, culture-specific vernacular, canonical English as well as imagined words. Her imagination might be a way to begin to describe her poetics. My experience of sitting in the reading and being immersed in her words leads me to believe that she does not so much believe in a “grand synthesis” or a “methodology to experience the world” so much as it makes me think Julie Patton is a believer in our capacity to dream.

“Who’s who and what not”

“Snot possible”

“I’m skipping all over the place”

“No that would interrupt the dialogue”

There is a dialogue, a collective of voices, in this first poem that is crammed against one another. We remain immersed in the poem. Unsure of where we are going, carried by undertow, then a cross-tide, we collide with objects. Julie ends the poem as abruptly as it began.

“Anyway, my mom’s a painter.”

She continues to read from her jumbled poems (which she says are pretty much all “book-length”). I think that the title of the next poem was “A Garden.” Even if this is not the title of the poem, it might be an accurate description of it. But, Julie’s garden was like no other garden I have ever been in, for that matter, it was unlike any garden I have even imagined.

She sang, broke words and affixed new tidbits where the arms and legs of the words once were. She incorporates peripheral noise and at times achieves a verbal “strut” by employing verse-like lyric.

“Flora and fauna

All over herself”

And we continue to experience the collective of voices, an old man, a musician, a panhandler… I don’t even know how to begin labeling these voices, and that is the beauty of it. The people in the poem are not as I describe them, they are not actually old or young or homeless or poor, they are simply people. No, they are not even people, they are voices. They are experiences.

She draws the audience into the work with laughter and comforting sounds. But, she is not interested in making the audience feel “at home.” She creates distance with long stretches of monotonous submersions; droning sequences of words that make nearly drown us. She is very conscious of these stretches, while she holds us under water longer than we would like, she never waits too long.

The only preparation we can do for Julie’s poetry is to forget everything and simply listen. In this sense, Julie accomplishes something that is coveted and fabled among writers. Listening to her work demands presence, bodily presence, mental presence and (or?) spiritual presence. The kind of places that Julie goes are so far away from academics and literary criticism that writing a conventional review of her work would be self-defeating. The reviewer would have to miss the reading in order to write a conventional, “critical” response.

Now, on to Charles Bernstein. He reads Louis Zukovsky in what he calls “Jew-face.” The play on words unwittingly serves to describe Charles’s face during the reading as well as the voice. One could be entertained solely by his silly faces. I missed out on a lot of the content as Charles read in a “voice.” Partly this I because of my interest in accents as a comedic strategy, I was more interested in the comedy than the local sensibility of the reading in “Jew-face.”

Charles stopped his performance to order a Gray Goose Martini, straight-up. He paused periodically to sip from his drink. Though it was a prop for the performance that made us realize our surroundings, I think that Charles simply wanted a drink.

Charles read a selection of poems from works of his stretching back into the late 80’s. A notable theme in the poems was an ironic or “sarcastic” play with/on writing. He played with legal language, academic discourse, conceptions of “intellectual property” and God knows what else. It is tough to pin him down to a narrow category of writing. He is all over the map.

His last poem “The Ballad of the Girly Man” is perhaps his most weighty poem. I sensed a discussion about the fallacy of moralist thinking and non-sense in jingoist dialogues that come in times surrounding war. In the poem, to be a “girly man” is simply the only rational choice for anybody with a good head on their shoulders.

Charles’s post-reading Q&A was more instructive for me than the poems themselves. He framed sarcasm as a kind of “given” based on his history. In many ways I relate to this sense because of my immediate family’s sense of humor. When we want to talk about difficult things like war or bad presidents, the only fully-developed faculty we have is our sense of humor (of which sarcasm is understood and explored at great length). In order to cope with certain terrible things in life, we try to laugh about them. I get the sense that Charles might come from a similar kind of family. His performance was evidence enough for me.