Poetry New York

Rodrigo Tuscano & Kristin Prevallet
Freddy Parish


    Rodrigo Tuscano reads his poem "Subject Line Subscribe (Society)" like a digital sampler, each word or phrase acting like a sound sample of its own.  His pronunciation is what catches my ear more than his word choices.  Consonants are hard like verbal punches. ("Bolt lock" he repeats, in a voice that sounds like a bolt locking.)
    He plays with how voice is connected to the words, sometimes matching them, as in "bolt lock" and sometimes mismatching them, as in when "poddy trained" is associated audibly with "pod" as a futuristic invention. This functions to make both dissections and connections between the sounds and what they represent. These dissections and connections can also be found in between different languages. Toscano demonstrates this by speaking in english, spanish and "spanglish," often times within a single line. For example, words in a heavy accent can sound like different words entirely, giving them a double meaning, or different meaning, dependent upon the listeners perception.


    Kristen Prevallet was a refreshing follow up to Tuscano in that she contrasted Tuscano's industrial sounding language tricks with a heartfelt and more straightforward prose. She first read a poem as an elegy for her father who committed suicide.  Her connection from poetry to the process of grieving was that they share a sense of movement. Her poems did move, and she read them as such. Her voice wove through words and emotions, sometimes simply pushing them out of the way, an aspect of the poem that I found touching and tragic, in that it seemed to demonstrate at times, perhaps unintentionally, the impotence of the intellect in the mending of the heart.
    Moving through grief can either mean denying it, or getting past it. In this poem I heard both, making it complex and realistic. It was not cliched or romanticized. It did not overly intellectualize emotions.  It did not try to solve death, it floated in its currents, observing the flow.