Poetry New York

Naropa poetry reading
St. Marks 4/14

Graduates from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado came together at the St. Marks church to read their work. The sixteen readers presented both poems and excerpts from novels in progress.

The first author, Jessica Rogers, read from her novel Names Escape Me. The story was of a girl recalling how she became a stripper. She and her boyfriend were drug addicts and the idea of stripping was offered as a means to acquire drugs. At first she blames her boyfriend for falling into the job but as the story progresses she realizes it was her idea to begin with. The text plays with memory and the concepts of names creating (or holding) identity. Rogers read a poem that played with taking on a specific role when given a title as a name (like Mother or Father).

Gary Parish might have been extremely nervous when he was reading. His poetry was very choppy, so much so that it created a rhythm. I couldn’t tell if this was intentional but it worked in his favor. He tended to preface his reading to the extent of sounding like he was unsure of himself. Parish wrote about cocks and presidents eating dogs and those sorts of images. His abrupt way of reading seemed to greet you in the same way the images hit.
Amy Matterer used a lot of dialogue between characters in her work. She used images to represent characters. In a poem about a woman searching for a book in a library the dialogue between the woman and the librarian becomes a miscommunication nightmare. As they try to understand one another the mystery of the book unravels. A woman walks in through the door in a thin summer dress to return a book, when she exits Mattterer simply refers to her like as “summer dress”. It makes the woman seem less important and the emphasis is placed on the dialogue happening between her and the librarian. It was an effective way to create drama and tension within the story of the poem.

The authors used many writing styles and different subject matter. Overall, hearing the Naropa students read was enjoyable. The biggest downfall of the event was the attempt to cram so many readers into one event.