Review of Poetry Reading

On March 8, 2007 I attended a student/faculty reading from the University Creative Writing Reading Series. Upon entering Hale 270 I was determined not to let the shabby seat-covers and disheveled lecture hall feel of the venue mar the reading. As the room filled up there was an air of excitement from readers and friends of readers, but what I heard most clearly was the embarrassingly loud and obnoxious man in front of me recounting a ridiculous break-up with lady "X" (he never actually referred to her as anything but feminine pronouns), to one friend, then yet again to another friend who was unfortunate enough to straggle in and sit near him. This same man was visibly disgruntled by the fact that the reading was to include poetry as well as prose, and dog-gone-it, that the prose was not coming until the end.

I was grateful then when Elizabeth Robinson rose to the podium to introduce the first reader, a graduate student in poetry, Clarissa Cuttrell who would be reading selections from a new manuscript. Poor lighting aside, Cuttrell had a decent stage presence, but she attempted an affected reaching into the audience with her neck and head that she must have picked up from another poet, during another reading. After a few minutes this affectation died away and Cuttrell assumed more natural poses to convey her work.

"Peregrination" was repeated mercilessly throughout her poems, as was "Field Sample," making these words the most memorable bits of her reading, much like one remembers a stone in a shoe. Cuttrell had a lovely reading voice and it rose out over the audience beautifully, however her poems left me with the impression that the world is really khaki-colored and I just hadn't noticed. Each poem read so much like the poem before it, words that sounded similar, words that evoked the same images, that it was difficult to tell one poem from the next, but the resemblance was too vague to call it a body with many parts. Cuttrell read lots of poems about travel, yet I didn't get to go anywhere or see anything, and felt that she left the audience with a better understanding of wicking fabric and internal frame backpacks than of lands far away.

Disappointed as I was with the first reader I was hopeful about the second poet, Elizabeth Robinson. She prefaced her reading by informing the audience that the poems stemmed from her interest in a particular polyglot, the long dead Pasoa, and that they were written in a style that varied greatly from her usual writing. Unfortunately I was not familiar with that writing so had nothing with which to compare.

Robinson was relaxed behind the podium and her voice had an exciting strength. However, after a few poems I began to find myself confused, as though she was speaking a language of which I knew only a few words and was desperate to piece together to make meaning. I could not follow the stream of thought running from Pasao, nor could I glean a greater meaning from the body of work. I did however catch and cling to one lovely line, 'death is a ghost with uneven legs'. That image was real to me and because she made it so, I took it as a souvenir and gave up my futile attempts at interpreting. The room was still but not rapt, so I assumed I was not alone in the dark.

"I feel like I am getting a rash on my soul," Pasao said through Robinson, and by the end of this reading, I concurred.