If I were to ask you lovely people to describe me in one word you would probably say something along the lines of artistic, bohemian, sophisticated, or gassy. So it should be quite the surprise to any of you that I went to a poetry reading for only the first time last night.
My internet pal/big time poet type person, Joe Massey, had trekked across the country by bus in a reverse manifest destiny kind of way to participate in this reading that took place in Brooklyn.
The reading was definitely an interesting experience. As someone who thinks he knows everything about which he knows nothing (what the?) I had some expectations of how this event would be. I figured there would be a bulk of people with super trendy thick rimmed Clark Kent glasses, at least one slightly balding white guy with an afro, some kind of pissy gay man, and a bevy of good looking women with really odd looking boyfriends. This assumption was pretty spot on.
I also didn't expect it to be all that stimulating to me apart from Joe's reading. This was very wrong. Between the soda machine I was leaning on for 45 minutes vibrating my genitalia to the brink of ejaculation, and the second poets use of the phrases "Hammer My mammary Glands" and "Mop up my meat," I was indeed quite stimulated.
Joe, whose livejournal is Mr.Tong Bliss, started off by making a noise which sounded like a pterodactyl sighing. Unlike the poet who read before him who had one 18 minute long garbage poem, Joe read numerous short form poems. And unlike the first poet of the evening who would preface reading one of her poems with some tidbit such as, "I wrote this after my brother died at a young age," Joe would tell a tale of punching out his publisher then sucking him off and "jacking each other in the ass with police batons." I luckily was standing at the front and facing the crowd so I got to enjoy the huge range of facial expression that came and went as he spoke.
All in all I had a very good time. I laughed, met some new people, drank a grape soda and heard some good poetry. Yeah that's right I enjoyed the poems dude. I'm all about that shit. I like Joe's poems because a lot of what he does, especially in his latest chapbook Bramble, is to take something small, simple and usually unnoticed by most people, such as a leaf blowing across a street, and makes you take notice the beauty of it. He makes the ordinary extraordinary....
What the fuck am I talking about? Even I didn't buy that stuff coming from me. I feel weird now.
Penis vaginaTom Selleck in a Kayak.
Much better.
come together, right now (literally)
4 years ago