A Live Reading with Zachary Schomburg & Ann Stephenson
Bare naked and unleashed , a high chair with flowers and sagging a sort of crayola tragedy. Alien pale flesh’s length strewn across a space, infinite and without sentient awareness of its blind truth. It just is and does. Unstoppable. Familial carnage and laughter drinks to wisdom and ideas. I lingered into the day fuzzed out and anxious. But not too anxious. It was going to be hosted by Blake Butler. Ann Stephenson, who hosts the reading series at Whitespace, “Ready Set Reading”, was going to read. I had seen her introduce other poets and found her candor and sense of stage presence solid and intriguing. Inadvertently, it was tested tonight. For almost two poems she endured a kind of warehouse awkward night watch security barren lighting – while projecting her mic-less voice to the echo of the room. As adeptly as blunt an error could be assuaged, it was.
A wash and a sigh. Awareness of the film featuring 60 writers reading in 60 different places. In front of churches. Laundromats. Subways. Backyards. Name it…each writer began with a nice pause to consider their image in their environment. Characters with personas came through often, coffees ready.
A guy under a Gothic arch punched my gut for one long mezmorish 45 seconds. A single punch- with a withdrawal like a longing as much as it trailed an emotional version of my intestines.He loomed down with a shadowy and puffy jowl,words verbalized about dark and morbid notions that often have trouble even solidifying just in thought. Very repugnant and in being so, delicious and blunt. I asked Blake his name and he told me but now I’ve forgotten. I promise to update. I will find out.
Then navel-bloated me, my thoughts drift inside and into analysis of recent and current events. processing and contemplating and imagining possible scenarios. from benign to strange behavior that communicated without use of spoken words. Jamie Iredell was out there. I admitted to him in the middle of a conversation that I was filling blank space with words. It later occurred to me that I could have been re-referring to the fact that I brought up the vispo show repeatedly out of reacti0n to a vague conversational anxiety. Or- it cld’ve been further attempting to address the vispo show itself and its curatorial approach, as if I was uber-obliviously pushy about what he didn’t have time to viddie in that bloody moment.
Self-Involved, Self-Indulgent, and demanding a white card on no premise definable. I fumbled with my camera and my keys and my other belongings, randomly losing one or the other in the building. Sitting in the back of the gallery. Something wasn’t right at all. Then it washed in with static. Tingles and the mind’s grey electric fuzz. Rabid sea lynched weedling minnows, razors against cerebellum shriveled labia-like uvulas of self-consciousness, exposed in a humid breeze of knived eyes and time. Alone and whispered about negatively, I saw it all unravel. Mirrored versions of careworn lines became crevasses for crows to fall into. Rooms vibrated against jagged stabbing knuckles and bloody drywall thoughts. Sickness and stinging, he bit back and meandered through so many thoughts about Eyedrum. Washed in phantom counterparts, the vindictive bizzaro world, a palindrome with something beneath it out of synch and screaming. Anxious bright lights and a loudness of nothing all around. Truth and practical things on ends of forks, rotten and unattended to, they finally go in yr mouth and good lord it tastes like shit. The reading had begun, and i slithered over into a seat next to Blake going oh shit they arent mic’d. “i’m going to get a mic.” i think was the upshot. and I had dashed for Mandie to help set up a bloody microphone -and then it was good.
Her words, Ann Stephenson’s were properly fluid in their organized elegance. So keenly beautiful, memory-driven associations of my childhood visits to rural areas came to mind. I sifted across the surface and dove in and out of her reading pattern, feeling what was said as much as literally processing.
I really enjoyed Zach Schomburg. He had himself introduced by what I could only gather had to be his girlfriend. She went for the endearing awkward and its cute and goofy/timid confidence. Honest admiration and soft sales. When Zach took the stage, he continued the same immediacy desire, the sensation that he is being somewhat improvisational as a sort of bare and raw honesty. The intent was to communicate warmly and with a closeness. He even began things by inviting people to be closer to the stage. It worked well into his reading because the pieces he wrote were all so smart and slightly dark and in cases without adornments in their intimate language. Sometimes comfortable enough to risk tipping a hat to sarcasm with strangers. Sometimes sneaky in their manner of engaging, the way he ends poems often utilized a sort of abruptness that forces personal closure in a solving satisfaction way. Smart plays into concepts. “Invisible, Not invisible”, I believe was a title- about brothers with misleading names, sets up and flips the path of thought on itself, he leads the poem with a performative technique that reinforces words that stand well on their own. A playful manner worked its way through very thought out notions turned into poems. I tried to buy his book but the motherfucker sold out pretty quick. There are worse problems to have, for both myself and the poet.
Almost forgot: I dorked out and asked Blake Butler to sign my copy of Scorch Atlas. I’m glad I did because what he wrote was suprisingly inspiring.
(Thanks to Ed Hall, Mandie Turner Mitchell, and Laura Hennighausen for being there for whatever and then some.)
-eggtooth
Zach Schomburg reads a scary satanic poem with i think satan floating over him during it
