Poetry New York

Rodrigo Toscano and Kristin Prevallet

The Bowery Poetry Club 4/15

Rodrigo Toscano started out performing poems from his book To Leveling Swerve. The first poem he read was Subject Line Subscribe (Society), which he explained was about our use with computer based correspondence. By annunciating very clearly he creates a robotic sound with his voice. The language changes from rapid speech to slow speech, next to one another it makes the line breaks heavy. It also changes from words we can decipher to million-mile-an-hour words, in which you only catch glimpses of what is there. Toscano also incorporates sounds into his poems that aren’t words at all. In the other poems he read he used these techniques as well. When he read Relay Alpha, Bravo, Charlie the words came in fast fragments using volume to create emphasis. His techniques, in combination with abstract language, created a strong rhythm to his poems to the point of sounding like music.

Kristen Prevallet read one of her poems from her book I, Afterlife. I didn’t get much from her reading the poem, but on the page it became much more appealing. Then she performed part of a play that she has translated. During the second part of her performance she asked Toscano to join her in acting out the play. Although there were several parts the two of them played all. Prevallet broke character by reacting to Toscano’s actions, which distracted from the piece. She read the script in a normal manner throughout most of the act instead of creating characters. In parts of the performance I found her overacting by using clichés (hand to her heart, or forehead). Because of this she didn’t communicate to the audience what was going on. She didn’t commit herself to the piece. Where she struggled Toscano held the performance together by creating strong characters within the script. He used the same techniques found in his poetry- sound duration, voice dialect, etc. in combination with body movement to paint scenes for the audience to see.