Yoga for Being Present

Friends,

Li-Young Lee was intense. I don't mean that in the snowboarder sense, but in the intense personality vein. The man is locked in intellectually that others couldn't hope to be. The way he talks about poetry is the way you imagine religious zealots talk about their church. Poetry, to Lee, holds the potential to be a universal divinity, taking in all that we were to understand our present fully to reach toward feeling close to God. Or maybe he means something else. I don't know, but his poems are closer to sermons for human feeling than anything else.

What amazed me the most about Lee is that while he did recycle some material I've heard him say before (the business about poetry being performed with the exhaled, dying, breath for example) was his extemporaneous genius. I like to think I'm a quick witted guy, but I'm sort of limited in my expression in those moments. Lee contains multitudes. I mean, in the middle of our Q&A after speaking about his trinity relationship between the you, the I and the me in reading poetry, and how there seems not to be a true I anymore, instead a me (meaning that we are not the sum of our parts, but rather the physical thing), he references the Simpson's. And during the reading, he pulled a few laughs from the audience in between his relgio-philosophical poetry. The guy's amazing.

As for the question I asked him about whether or not he feels any obligation to the audience to pick work that they would know when designing a program (does he pull from the greatest hits, or go all new album). He said no and in fact would counter program (I mentioned how much I liked his poem Black Petal to him...and he didn't read it tonight, so goes to show you he ain't a liar). His response was along the lines of he wants to remove performance from the reading, and he wants the words to take you to the moment, and it's the pursuit of that one true moment of connection that guides his poetry readings, and nothing else. That seems interesting to me. It suggests that entertainment isn't a part of poetry readings, and that performance is somehow a low idea, if you follow and that the act of being up in front of a crowd, relaying poems, isn't performance...then what is it, and isn't whatever that is actually a style of performing? I would have liked to keep plumbing this because that also suggests that audiences come to readings expecting that too, right? And I don't know if that's true, but you know, I didn't get a chance to really get at his thoughts on all of that, or if he thought that the might and powerful Oprah could save poetry by picking a poetry book for her book club...we sort of got a little off topic from time to time.

With that said, the reading tonight was terrible. No fault of Bronson (who read, and did a good job), nor was it a fault of Li-Young Lee, who I'm sure was great, if I only could have focused on him. See, there was a noisy baby. And there was constant stream of people coming into the auditorium. Some people were talking during the poetry reading. And toward the end, you could hear the music playing in the halls of the student union emanating through the doors. Not to disparage any of the other Good Thunder guests we have, but Li-Young Lee, to me, is a big deal. And what does Mankato do to welcome him to our humble program? We show our collective ass during the reading. It's embarrassing. I mean, a fucking baby? Are you kidding me? Yeah, maybe if you can't get a sitter, then somebody stays the fuck at home with the kid. Talking during a poetry reading? Did they think there were in a goddamn shitty movie? Oh, those cocksuckers.

Oh, I also missed the after party because of bad planning on my part. I just plain fucked up. I truly wanted to go, but I had to go to the library right after the reading, or I would have forgotten about checking out Waiting for Godot, which I need for my thesis. I had to do it then because the inspiration was hot in my head and if I didn't go after the reading I would have forgotten. Thing of it is, in my hurry, I failed to secure a ride to the after party. I managed to get one for getting home (thanks Jorge!), but fucked up on the getting there part. There were any number of people who I could have politely asked to wait as I checked out the books and DVD I wanted...took me all of ten minutes...and I didn't. Shame on me. I was hoping to bullshit with the guy if he was there...get him off his game and ask him about pizza and baseball, see what else is going on in his noggin. Anyway, I hope it was a good time and someone wore a lampshade on his/her head.

viva el mustache