RSS
Home
Allegrezza and Anderson: Bleeding into Focus
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Joe Judd: Owner of the literary oasis in Wicker Park, Myopic Books
Being curator of the Myopic Books Poetry Series has its perks—I get to hear some of the best poets in Chicago read their new work! This past Sunday was no exception. Bill Allegrezza and Karen Leona Anderson stopped in at Myopic to read, as well as sell a few books. Anderson originally hails from Connecticut and has received degrees from Iowa, Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and earned a PhD from Cornell. At the end of each day she finds herself near Baltimore, however, because she is assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Bill Allegrezza wears many hats—poet, editor, publisher, professor. Curator of the Hyde Park poetry series called Series A, Bill Allegrezza has been editor of the journal moria for years and looms large over the poetry scene of Chicago. With Ray Bianchi he edits Cracked Slab Books, which recently produced an anthology of Chicago poetry that succeeded in the difficult task of cataloging some of the work of the interesting poets writing in Chicago in recent years. Chicago has seen its share of important authors (Sandberg, Anania, Hoover, Monroe, Mac Low, Carroll, Chernoff) and I can’t name all of them here, but many of the younger poets, locals as well as transplants, owe a huge debt to Allegrezza and Bianchi for compiling this work in their fine book.
So, I looked forward to hearing Allegrezza read because my experience of his readings has been that he never reads long enough! At Myopic he didn’t deviate from his usual modus operandi but it was good to hear him bring his work to life by reading it aloud.(Hey, I think I'm included on that link, too.)
Allegrezza’s often cryptic work is informed by a wide range of sources including his study of postmodern thought, the Black Mountain poets (Creeley comes to mind), classical texts such as the Divine Comedy mixed and commingled with his own personal worldscape. It seems important to note the Allegrezza’s writing seems to be more of a questioning, a search and a journey through language with no finite resolutions offered and none required. Imagery comes and goes (“near lapis-blue cacti, mathematical moon inscriptions”) but ultimately the poems don’t rely on any “safe” or reliable presumption and illustrate more effectively a sense of absence or else the work seems to represent linguistically the nature of a language that doesn’t resent its own multiplicity.
Allegrezza's interesting blog p-ramblings offers this lately as an example of what he's up to in his poetry.
always decline
add two boxes to number three and then erase
assume that language has betrayed you (we have fees for everything)
always decline
do not leave your number
join the masses
imagine that the big rally has passed and that three cards never win
embrace the distraction
always decline
As visiting poet, Karen Anderson did not disappoint and the audience recognized it as she shared some new work, as well as the poems included in her new book Punish Honey. One great thing about Myopic Books poetry readings is the sense that the audience is actually listening! And Anderson's poetry was a malleable pleasure to hear—As if to twist and bend the ore of these words to burn them into something new, not in order to disfigure them but to free them of their inherent multiplicities, which represents, I think, more than using their face value to construct a poem that merely describes. In the hive, as explained by Anderson, is the analogy and metaphor for democracy, modern metropolitan life, office constructs—with the roles of the players laid out much as in the hive—drone, worker, queen. It was interesting to hear her playful description of her projects as she passed out cards that depicted the bees she described with illustrations of bees from an antique text. Hives as capitalism, hives as monarchy. Tulips and animals people her poems with linguistic resonance—the derivations of words leading often to other rivulets of sound/meaning within a poem, as much as leading to the center, as we were also participants in a journey that night to the center of the hive or meaning. Often, what was at first perceived as disassociation led to an association or illustration of the interconnectedness of players in the natural world. Anderson’s poems illumine in a whispered shout and she seemed pleased with her rediscovery of the poems as she read them aloud as a “whisper and spit house built for karma” and as also mentioning how the “natural world bleeds into focus the daily battle of a prom dress.” The best lines read from her new book (such as “as the coyote turns the cat to sweetness in its mouth”) really resonated on a visual level, too. Anderson’s landscapes are multi-layered and melodic with an easy wit that the audience really enjoyed.
Tonight I hope to make it to New Wave Coffee, 2557 N. Milwaukee, in Logan Square to catch visiting poet Joshua Beckman as he reads from his new book Take It. Folks say New Wave is like the second coming of FILTER, the old Wicker Park landmark that finally closed, so if that's the case I'll be right at home. See you?
For more info. on New Wave Coffee.
Myopic Books, home to poetry, chess, music, and Lenny, the cat.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
