Making Small Things Necessarily Big
I went to a reading this week on Valentines Monday, attended primarily by dateless students and poetry addicted instructors of Austin Community College. We celebrated love's (primarily the erotic kind, philosophically speaking, Mark you remember that class) woeful and blessed way of bringing persons, who were by all practical purposes dead, to a revelatory awareness of a beautiful and new kind of existence with their newly found object of obsession.
One by one, a poet walked to the stage and stood illumined by a street lamp hung against the brick wall, marking the edge of the coffee venue. Some of these readers became the poems they were reading, finding emotions somewhere inside themselves that were not there a moment before. One woman, asked to read as a special guest, weaved her way from the back of the crowd reciting her first poem. We played along with her, watching as she moved from table to table before finally reaching the wooden platform. She was no less lyrical when she put her poetry down.
One man felt it more appropriate to sing his words. A nervous student hid behind his sketch pad. Most rallied around the idea of, "once upon a time I had sex with this ivory statue." And if there was one thing that all of these poets had in common, it was this aim to retell what some other poet had already said, only differently. Poets who have something new to say and who and who say it well are rare. Poets who redefine what we mean are priceless.
But what about this idea of "love" being "sex"? It just doesn't make sense. And if there was one thing that did make sense the whole night to me, it was what one young man said before reading a poem about a close friend of his. What about all the other kinds of love that we leave out on Valentines day? Where are their days? I think we should devote more than one day to exploring this idea of heartbreak and heartthrob.
What is one your most uplifting or devastating love moments?
One by one, a poet walked to the stage and stood illumined by a street lamp hung against the brick wall, marking the edge of the coffee venue. Some of these readers became the poems they were reading, finding emotions somewhere inside themselves that were not there a moment before. One woman, asked to read as a special guest, weaved her way from the back of the crowd reciting her first poem. We played along with her, watching as she moved from table to table before finally reaching the wooden platform. She was no less lyrical when she put her poetry down.
One man felt it more appropriate to sing his words. A nervous student hid behind his sketch pad. Most rallied around the idea of, "once upon a time I had sex with this ivory statue." And if there was one thing that all of these poets had in common, it was this aim to retell what some other poet had already said, only differently. Poets who have something new to say and who and who say it well are rare. Poets who redefine what we mean are priceless.
But what about this idea of "love" being "sex"? It just doesn't make sense. And if there was one thing that did make sense the whole night to me, it was what one young man said before reading a poem about a close friend of his. What about all the other kinds of love that we leave out on Valentines day? Where are their days? I think we should devote more than one day to exploring this idea of heartbreak and heartthrob.
What is one your most uplifting or devastating love moments?
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On Valentine's Day one year I hyperextended a girl's elbow. I wrecked a tandem bike while talking on my cell phone in route to Sweet Eugene's. We were less than a hundred yards away. Later, much later, I took her on what she called, "...the best date ever!" A month later she would never return my phone calls. Whatever.
In college, I was riding my bike with a girl on the front handlebars (for some reason that was the thing to do at A&M to show off your girlfriend). Well, we were going pretty fast and I started being a cool guy, weaving back and forth on the sidewalk until the tires slipped out from under us. The bike flipped forward on top of her, and she struggle to keep from cursing my name.