With awesome cheese and bread from White Lotus Farms and 3 spectacular poets, Monday evening’s Poetry Series at Literati was a great start to the week! And a great tribute to the celebration of April as National Poetry Month.
While nibbling on the cheese that Sarah Messer brought from White Lotus Farms (where she works), Messer and Kidder Smith, her co-author, began reading from their book Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481). Similar to their collaboration on the book, Smith read the poems first in Chinese and Sarah then read the final poetic English version. Smith explained before reading, in his quiet but resonating voice, that Master Ikkyu was a Japanese monk but that during this period all really well educated Japanese monks wrote poems in Chinese. It was fascinating to hear him read the poem and then immediately to get to hear the English. Even for me, who doesn’t understand the language in which the poem was written, there is something inspiring by hearing it how it was originally meant to be heard.
Sarah Messer then read some of her work on her own. She actually started with a poem that was inspired by her work with Kidder Smith. One night she mistranslated a line they were working on and it inspired her poem “Today.” One of my favorites of the evening, and one she had shared in the poetry class I take with her, is her poem “My life as a Puritan Bedpost.” My favorite lines are in the ending: “Now all the Puritans have died. But their ghosts keep trying/ to lie down again and again inside me.” Read the rest of the poem HERE, from when it was published in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
Suzanne Wise, the other featured reader of the evening, read from her new manuscript. It is a book length love letter to Ray Johnson. Ray Johnson was an artist who worked in mail art. Wise introduced us to some insights as to how he worked and some of his quirks that she used to spark her poems, which was REALLY helpful because I knew nothing about him before Monday. Ray Johnson would often send collages to famous artists (usually friends of his) and have them add to it before sending the work back. He often refused to show his work and made it difficult for admiring collectors to obtain his art. He was the founder of the New York Correspondence School. Wise’s poetry, in this extended letter form, is very sound conscious; her lines are full of assonance, alliteration, and slant rhymes. It was great to listen to and her voice has such a clear quality to it that her reading was very beautiful. Along with its beauty there were also humorous and entertaining moments by her personification of death, lines like “yesterays,” or vivid lines such as “slamming into a wall…we are a wallflower.” I can’t wait to see the whole manuscript!
As April is National Poetry Month, Literati and other local bookstores will be hosting more amazing events that my fellow poets and I don’t want to miss out on. Keep a look out!
