On 3 Poets Reading at City Lights
On Three Poets Reading at City Lights is a poem that I wrote shortly after attending a poetry reading at the well-known San Francisco bookstore. A few days had passed and the reading was still in my mind so I knew I had to write about it to let it out!
On 3 Poets Reading at City Lights
The beat and the breath converge
In this musty room layered with history
Where eager college freshman father
Hardly noticing the flecks of skin from poets past
That they inhale while they listen
Three poets share space
And breath
Ideas
Love and sex and theories
Passion and commitment and drama
Stage fright and a love of theatrics
First the MFA student
Freshly voicing intricate webs of woe
Promoting work that she has not enslaved herself to
And yet has become shackled by
She will grow to loathe all that she has written in this thesis
She does not know this yet
And so smiles demurely at the applause
At 30 I am not young enough to believe in her work
Not that I don’t appreciate the effort
But that I recognize the artifice
It is not a package of passionate outpouring perfected into precise poetry
It is words spilled on a deadline and sliced with a red pen
Words driven by caffeination
And edited by the calendar
There is nothing wrong with this way of crafting
But I miss the magic of believing in timeless art
College freshman surround me in the dusty space
Spandex and latex and tussled headbanded hair
Bright eyes lined heavily with hopefulness barely hidden beneath faux angst
I want to HOWL
Middle aged modern poet woman proceeds the student
Graying hair and crinkled eyes
A dramatic improvised reading straight out of the seventies
She is mismatched to the era
And it bothers me that I am closer in age to her than to the student
But you can hear the Beat in her breath
And I feel it in my heart
Ferlinghetti falls from the wall
The restless student who caused the cascade smiles uncomfortably
Eyes turn away from the breathing poet
Who powers on until breathless
At 30 I know that she struggles to pay her bills
That she lives in too much isolation
That she sacrifices to live a poetic life
That she fights to maintain balance
That she writes to stay sane
The best poets of the Beat past were Madmen
At 18 you can idealize madness
Inhale cigarette smoke and believe that cancer is a curse that
Infuses life with magic tragedy
The insides of madhouses and jails seem but a price to pay
For decadence, for art, for truly feeling real
The truth is that insanity is boring from the inside out
And working poets are the woman who exercises creative madness
In between watering her plants and feeding her cats
And calling the plumber when she can’t fix her own leaks
Madmen drown in flooded houses
And there is nothing poetic about the mess
The college freshmen giggle at the awkward reading
And get excited when the glittery eyed headliner heads to the podium
Too-long black lashes curl painfully
Against snow white soft skin
A contradiction in action
Spider legs on pale roses
This stunning sex kitten captures the attention of college freshmen
And captivates me at 30
In her long flag of a dress
With her pouty crimson lips
Reading her film and fashion writing from the heart
She embodies all that writing really is
It is insecurity in drag
It is poems instead of fiction
It is biography and autobiography in one
She suggests we wear our poems like vintage outfits
Treasured for their link to the past
And valued for their expression of personality
I admire her for that
College students squeal at her eroticized political poetry
I moan inwardly at this mutual masturbation
Ultimately the beat has always been about sex
Boundaries traversed on geography and bodies
Borders bleeding into one another
I may not like the whole package but I feel the passion in the packaging
I am not 18
I am not 30
I am just a poet
