Poetry New York

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In the first of the Evergreen Reading Series, Rodrigo Toscano and Kristen Prevallet performed at The Bowery Poetry Club. Rodrigo Toscano began by reading a few poems from his book To Leveling Swerve. He performed his poetry humorously and fast-paced, but still understandable. His poems could practically have been tongue-twisters by the way he read them, a mesmerizing act to watch as his voice would change quickly and smoothly, with the perfect pauses in between. As Toscano stated in the question and answer time after the reading, he is “influenced by stoppage.” The sudden stops in his poems add to the sense of surprise, or as Barbara Guest says in Forces of Imagination, “The Element of surprise in a poem, in its development, in the handle it seizes to bring itself upright, on tiptoe.” The stop and go rhythm he described was not just randomly placed there, but rather made the poem that much more effective. One of his poems, “Subject Line Subscribe (Society) circulated around technology and the latest gadgets one could purchase. Since his mouth formed the sounds of made-up words, the computerized effect of the way he said the lines added to the way technology is already thought of. The stop and go rhythm helped Toscano to reiterate that he was talking about technology, for technology is very stop and go and only produces a result when you press a button or “scroll down”.

            Kristen Prevallet followed with her book she described as an elegy about her father who committed suicide, which moves through cycles of emotions. She read from that book in addition to sharing her insights about translating poetry. She described the process for translating poetry as a balance between writing a newspaper article with just the facts and then layering on top of that a set of lyrics that makes the piece fuller and poetic. She discussed how important it is as a writer and a translator for you to be open to your work and your creativity. As she said, “When you’re a writer, you leave yourself open to be possessed”. It is so important to be able to be possessed by one’s work so that you can fully immerse yourself into it that your true emotions and thoughts come through.

            The two of them provided an interesting contrast since Toscano had a little more rhythm to his reading as opposed to Prevallet who seemed as if she didn’t know her work quite as well. Toscano’s performance was more memorable and upbeat, though Prevallet had interesting insights on the art of translating poetry. Overall it seems Toscano’s poetry is better read aloud and perhaps Prevallets poetry would be better read on the page.

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