under one roof
Posted by: parrishka on: July 25, 2006
Every time we talk about how splintered the various poetry communities are in toronto, i bring myself to the conclusion that this is a condition of size. if there were only 20 people in the city interested in going to poetry readings, we’d all end up at the same place. if there was only one regular poetry reading series in the city, we’d all go, and take whatever they gave us. heck, growing up in st. kitt’s, there was only one venue for art of any kind: the Niagara Artist’s Centre. In my last year of high school, when I finally found a crowd i truly wanted to be part of, we would go to NAC any time they had something going, no matter what it was. I first saw the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou there. I first heard Kurt Swinghammer play there. I remember some one act play about the Mata Hari. And I have a vague blur of countless art exhibitions. As enriching as it was, I’ve just figured it was a condition of cultural impoverishment.
So, today, I came across the website for The Bowery Poetry Club, in NYC, and see that they’ve got events featuring hip hop, spoken word, slam, and the likes of Brian Kim Stefans, Lisa Jarnot, and Edwin Torres. Is this cross pollination a product of scarcity again? It would seem so, and yet, the BPC is not the only house of poetry in New York. There’s the venerated St. Mark’s Poetry Project, with its roots in the new york school, and associations with the experimental scene, and the Nuyorican Cafe, dominated by slam and hip hop.
incidentally, one of my friends from that high school scene went on to be the artistic director of NAC for a while, and one of my friends from my current life is going to be running a poetry reading there, which makes me all kinds of happy.
13 Responses to "under one roof"
July 25, 2006 at 6:45 pm
i read at the bowery poetry club in 2002, as part of the mini-digital poetry festival organized by brian kim stefans. prize budget for boys and i travelled down as the canadian contingent. the space is right across from CBGB’s, which i found hella neat. as for the bpc itself, it’s a comfy cafe with a nice stage. we had between 30-50 people in attendance, and a solid half of them were there out of genuine interest in the festival. the other half seemed to be friends, family, etc. neil, jason, and i had an intense enthusiasm for the event (and voiced it, too), which we discussed afterwards seemed to be at odds with a general vibe (polite clapter, crossed arms, etc.).
my guess is that toronto could support a space like the bpc. the audiences wouldn’t necessarily cross over that much, but i suspect there’d be plenty of event organizers interested in such a space. such a space might encourage new events to pop up, too. but then, it’d be really lovely to have a small-press bookstore as well…
i’m smitten with the khyber in halifax…
July 26, 2006 at 7:59 am
hrmm.. sort of a field of dreams meets stein phenomenom, eh?
if you build it, they will come. but they won’t like it.
there is no use in poets coming.
and i’m smitten with joel plaskett’s “down at the khyber,” which mythologized that place for me long ago.
July 26, 2006 at 12:15 pm
sfunny, i’ve become much less interested in stylistic cross-pollination these days. it’s just one of those poetry truisms that there is intrinsic merit in different kinds of poetry coming together in peace in harmony. this kind of thinking informed most of the series i attended in the 90s, which professed electicism as the foremost value of a poetry event, and still hangs over in a lot of events around toronto today.
i think you’re right – scale has so much to do with it. back in the day there were so few venues that a series couldn’t achieve critical mass without being receptive to anything and everything performed with the name of poetry. these days, there are too many options, so people form like-minded communities. poetry has always made the most sense at a smaller scale.
these days, there’s a kind of maturity in various scenes, who are all pursuing their own aesthetics and idioms, and i’m seeing that as a good development: i’m interested to see which directions various aesthetics will go unfettered by some sense that despite our differences we’re all poets underneath. it’s the distinctions that i find most interesting.
thing is, i don’t buy that too much cross-pollination actually happens. maybe a few styles and effects, but the distinctions between schools and styles are actually far more fundamental than that. the philosophical underpinnings of styles (let’s say lyrical, spoken word, avant garde) reveal radically different views about language, thought and identity.
after struggling with this, and feeling it slightly impolitic, i’m coming to the conclusion that poetry is doing pretty well these days because it’s splintered. poets are challenging each other within their aesthetics, and those aesthetics are strengthening and coming into their own. moreover, crossovers make far more sense when artists (or groups of artistis) have a strong sense of what they’re on about anyway.
i find it interesting that eclecticism within any particular poetry event is such a burning issue, when it seems less so in the music world. various music scenes kinda do their own thing, and very few find this problematic. moreover, i’d argue that it strengthens the eclectic events when they do happen: that way we can revel in the differences and the inevitable cultural cross-over messiness instead of pretending that the ultimate goal of every aesthetic movement is to find its underlying sameness with other movements.
July 26, 2006 at 1:54 pm
My grandfather used to tell this story:
The Jewish version of Robinson Crusoe is stranded by himself on a desert island. When a boat arrives finally to rescue him, the captain says, “Robbie, why have you built 2 synagogues on this island? Why do you need 2?”
Robinson Crusoe points at one of the synagogues and says, “Feh! That one I don’t go to.”
July 26, 2006 at 7:03 pm
ya, I was feeling much like you, stop14, in fact, didn’t you borrow that “look at the music scene” argument from me?
but the bottom line for me is that I’m bored. I’m bored with us. i don’t want this intermingling because i think it’s good for us, like eating your vitamins. this isn’t a broccoli theory thing; this is hedonism.
and i want some fresh perspectives on our tired old arguments. and i know- there’s nothing stopping me then from going to other events (and I have and I will) but limited time and social energy.
i’m just sayin.
July 26, 2006 at 8:21 pm
You know, one thing that strikes me about this discussion is that there are at least four things we’re looking at — artistic practice, aesthetic affiliation, social affiliation, and philosophical thinking (I could complicate it further by tossing in politics, but I won’t) — and we’re all talking as if everyone had them all neatly lined up together. Which some people do, and that may be when things are liable to get a bit tedious. But surely not everyone actually has a consistent position across all four points. Lord knows I don’t. And that’s where it stands to be more interesting — if your artistic practice, say, doesn’t actually match up with your theory, or your theory with your primary affiliations, it’s less comfortable, but also less boring.
Though this depends on people being willing to admit and examine these internal conflicts, which many would prefer to keep buried in favour of maintaining a single identification.
And thus I put into literary effect lessons I learned from the Bosnian war about complicating group identity formation. You just never know when a war will come in handy.
July 27, 2006 at 9:24 am
fair enough, maggie. i guess i’m not only bored. i’m also lazy! pursuing these distinctions takes social energy and conversational finesse, because, as you say, they’re often cloaked (mostly, i’d wager, unintentionally). and an ear able and willing to hear.
July 27, 2006 at 10:03 am
well, we’re all lazy about these things. There’s a strong ingrained tendency to think of identity as unitary, and complicating that is always a bit of work, and sometimes tense. probably I’m more aware of this because of my consistent inability (not only in the lit world) to get my practices and beliefs and affiliations as neatly lined up as some people do (or appear to do, more realistically). Insofar as I myself cloak these distinctions — which I do — it’s fairly intentional, for the sake of social ease, and this is just another kind of laziness, innit?
July 27, 2006 at 10:36 am
that’s why I liked the “about” of a teacher’s blog I used to be linked to (gotta fix that), which said “my beliefs are not inline with my practice.”
bah. we contradict ourselves. we’re vast and contain multitudes and all that.
but I have been revisiting the identity and group formation thing again. and will likely start a fresh post about it.
July 27, 2006 at 12:53 pm
With respect to the Bowery Poetry Club, I get the feeling the eclecticism is the result of some sort of vision on Bob Holman’s part: roughly, that poetry–all poetry–needs to be brought down to street level. In other words, the eclecticism is deliberate, but it’s part of an attempt to pull a wide swath of poetry into a particular social, economic, and cultural context. I think as well that there might be a kind of streetwise survivalist impulse behind it all.
I tend to think that reading series and other artistic events make the most sense when they’re approached as a thesis or hypothesis. I mean, all probably are anyway, but making these theses conscious is likely a good idea.
July 28, 2006 at 10:20 am
btw… to go back a few notches in the comments, i likely did steal the music argument from you. sadly, it’s now coming to me like my own highest thoughts. thing is, i’ve used it so much that i’m bored with it myself, so you’re welcome to have it back.
July 25, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Heh, I’ve made the same observation about the activist communities in Peterborough and in Toronto — here every tiny Marxist or Trotskyist or anarchist or peacenik tendency has its own organization & spends much time trashing the others (especially those nearest on the spectrum but not quite the same); in Peterborough, there were so few people of vaguely leftish leanings that we all had to get along, often without even realizing we were supposed to be at each other’s throats.
As for the Bowery Poetry Club, I think what’s happening there is the opposite of scarcity — there’s so *much*, that if the people running the club want to have a range of different cliques (so to speak), it’s possible to do so. I’d bet that the audiences still pretty much divide into their own familiar little circles & backtalk each other after events … or maybe I’m just cynical. Or have spent too many years thinking about group identity formation.
– mh