Small Press Fest Review

Saturday, March 17, 2007, I attended the culminating event of the Small Press Fest, part of the University's Creative Writing Reading Series, a reading by three professional poets, Laynie Browne, Brian Henry, and Andrew Joron.

The secret elevator lifted me swiftly to the British Studies room on the fifth floor of Norlin Library where it spit me out onto a busy carpet. The room was long and large with beamed ceilings and dark furniture. There was a folding table against a sidewall besmirched with haphazardly placed trays of food. The lighting above the podium was non-existent, making the baby grand stuffed behind the podium look almost as dark and ominous as the open mouth of the fireplace. I chose an armchair near the window, behind the only other people in the room, and waited.

When finally the reading began, it was Laynie Brown who was introduced first. She addressed the audience, which had multiplied to about twenty or so, in a soft, steadied voice. She read her poetry in the same small voice, and I couldn't help but think that had she delivered it more boldly, the words might have carried more weight.

Though there was no particular theme or poem I found utterly compelling in Brown's work, she did present a few ideas such as 'The sonnet as personal amulet', that I felt were of note. Thinking about the words of a sonnet coming together as a sort of personal protection was intriguing, and I would guess, an inventive way to market poetry. Brown also read a sound translation of Rilke. I was taken with the way her English words clanged together to make noise that was beautifully German. All in all the poems that were collaborations with Brown's children were the most salient of the bunch, and hung strongly in the air as Brown's voice became louder and surer with their reading.

Brian Henry took the podium next and immediately overwhelmed me with a feeling of his self-importance. Instead of being put off by this, I was hoping his poetry would serve to justify it. In my estimation it did not. Henry was a dynamic presenter, but the words carried less weight than their sounds. His brief preface to the poem "More Dangerous than Dying," describing the stench of a paper mill and the subsequent life of its workers, was more memorable than the poem itself, which conveyed little aside from his head bending to punctuate the important words. All in all, Henry's delivery, though engaging, could not make up for what his reading selections lacked.

Lastly, Andrew Joron stood in front of the audience, a shy man who would find it hard to look up while reading. The young woman who introduced Joron did a wonderful job of drawing his life from his sci-fi roots to his philosophy of language which includes the idea that language is haunted by its aloneness. It was this philosophy that carried Joron's work and made it compelling with lines like "silence needs no translation, in this it resembles a scream," "writing is the silencing of speech," and "poetry is neither true nor untrue." Joron used alliteration as a device to convey the jumble of sounds language truly is, and he managed this so artfully that I understood the deep philosophy behind the device before I understood that it was through mere repetition of sound that this philosophy was revealed.

If Joron could fortify his stage presence and mode of presentation, I imagine he could become a poet much sought after at readings.

This concludes the Small Press Fest.