Last Monday at KGB Bar, our own series founder Star (“I
can’t be a celebrity because I punctuate”) Black, took to the podium with
friend and city poet Geoffrey O’Brien. Star read from her new book, Velleity’s
Shade, out later ths year from Saturnalia Books (www.saturnaliabooks.com).
The essential tension in this work lies in the balance between the rapidly
collecting images and registers, and an ever-present attention to form. The
poems bump along with questions (“Do you think I need surgery?”) and iron-clad
declarations (“The road is too possible. It’s in the way”) that transform into
startling images (“a lake dematerializing into snap turtles”) — surrealism
in its original sense, the yoking together of the unexpected. In the flesh, it
was the various personae in the work that resonated. Star’s powerful presence
brought out the wry moments in her varied “I”s, the teeth in the lines.
Early on she offered a poem to the
ambitious weaver Arachne, a useful talisman as other poems touched on (“but not
really”) Man Ray, the abruptness of monsoons, the military, asexuality, aging.
(Read a few of the poems here: http://www.theawl.com/2010/01/the-poetry-section-four-poems-by-star-black.)
Geoffrey O’Brien (“My first friend
in New York!” says Star) shared some brand new work as well as a taste of his book
Early Autumn, out next month from Salt (www.saltpublishing.com).
The poet’s omnivorous appetite for the arts was evident in an elegy expressed
via music references, a collage of pulp prose, an operatic, lovelorn
declaration by a Moorish princess (inspired by the 17th century
dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca) and his own eye-opening first encounter
with George Oppen’s work. Writing itself as an image (letters as insects) was
recurrent, as was memory as a place — a garden, an attic.
O’Brien closed with excerpts from a
long poem that inhabits a great part of Early Autumn. Inspired by Hubert
Robert’s paintings of ruins (http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/71/50) — ruins
of the ancient world, but also ruins of buildings currently in existence — the
poem resembles an extended musical improvisation. That elusive, oh-so-gratifying
moment when the act of writing opens up, no longer an effort, but an
experience, was palpable, and made a solid case for the long poem. The image of
ruins seemed to press the poet to recreate New York City entire, leaping from
scene to scene, with September 11 a latent presence (“nothing is permanent”).
Star Black read a poem she dedicated
to a poet (unnamed) she had met in her early days in New York: “When he asked,
‘Do you write?’ I realized he meant ‘Do you write poetry?’ and it’s a question
I’ve been trying to answer ever since.” I tend to approach poems as questions,
but it seems like a useful new way to hear them, as answers, and we lucky listeners
had a few to take home.
-- Megin Jimenez
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