Welcome Wonder Words: Poetry at the Dali

Peter Meinke and Denise Duhamel answering questions
after their poetry reading at the Dali Museum

Helen Pruitt Wallace (Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg) hosted a poetry reading of Denise Duhamel and Peter Meinke (Poet Laureate of Florida) at the Dali last Thursday.  I'm happy to report wonderful moments of remembering for me such as: Oh yeah! Feminism isn't dead! And poets are often really freaking funny! And words can be hysterical or heartbreaking or both.  In short, although I didn't know it, I needed a poetry infusion.

Denise Duhamel started out reading some collaborative pieces she wrote with Maureen Seaton. Since Maureen was one of my favorite professors in graduate school - not only a phenomenal poet, but also a unbelievably kind, supportive and insightful teacher - it felt like a literary reunion for a minute there.  Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have been writing collaborative pieces for decades.  As Denise noted, they started out in a time before texting, cell phones, before email really; they would call each other and leave lines on each other's answering machines. This is what I'd loved about the poets I knew in graduate school - the playfulness, the humor, the just-messing-around that can sometimes end up being gorgeous (and sometimes not - I'm not any of our exquisite corpse poetry exercises featuring chicken testicles ever evolved into high art, although they did inspire some snorting laughter and a running joke).  One poem of Duhamel and Seaton's poems took on gender by adding it into pop culture references, e.g., "The hills are alive with the sound of gender," which ended up creating one of the funniest list poems I've heard in a while. You can find gender in the darnedest places.

Denise moved on to reading some poems from Blowout, her latest collection.  Many of them centered around life post divorce, and the awkwardness of reentering the dating world after a long absence.  As someone long single, the piece about the guy who worked on her kitchen asking her out hit some familiar mental acrobatics.  You know it's a totally bad idea - and yet, hey, he would be handy around the house, at least during those moments when he was sober.  Many of her poems had a funny-but-ill-fated theme running underneath -- for instance, the poem that featured the narrator and her (at the time) husband watching a young couple at the beach argue.  The older couple add in lines for the young couple, circling around their own marital discord, only to become disconcerted in the end as the distant young lovers reconcile, something clearly not in the cards for those who were providing them with dialogue.

The other poet of the evening, Peter Meinke, won my heart over early by starting by saying, "Well, after that, I'm sure hearing from an old white guy is just what you want." The theme of the evening was Memory & Desire, and he too wrote about yearning.  The poem of his that particularly stuck for me was about long married tennis players, and the empty space when one players is no longer there to send the ball over the net. He also read a section about children disappearing into the fog while sledding, a haunting image. His later book is a children's book, with illustrations by his wife Jeanne Clark.  Jeanne was in the audience, and when after the reading, the poets took questions, including on collaboration given Duhamel's long experience with it, Meinke noted that he did not collaborate; Jeanne piped in with "We collaborate in different rooms."  Each is in charge of their own art in their own way, which was perhaps the theme overall.  Collaborative or not, the words find voice through sharp and dedicated minds.

I left the theater with that good glow knowing that there are people out there creating, laughing, and transforming the painful into the sublime.  I love what words used well can do, the access they give to our messy little souls.

http://thedali.org/event/poetry-at-the-dali-hosted-by-helen-pruitt-wallace-2/
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/denise-duhamel
http://www.petermeinke.com/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/maureen-seaton

creative collaborations and creative snarls...

I have collaboration on the mind, largely because I learned just yesterday that my friend & grad school classmate Neil de la Flor and friend & former professor Maureen Seaton's co-authored book of poetry, Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Blue Birds, won the Sentence Book Award and will be published by Firewheel Editions. It's a big year for Neil, as his solo book of poetry, Almost Dorothy, will be published in the spring. As for me, I can say I knew him way back when, drinking red wine and eating chocolate crepes on South Beach.

Aside from being a fantabulous poet, Neil is a natural collaborator. The only successful collaborative work I've done was with him, and Mario Villa, back in grad school. Of course, this was for Maureen's class, collaborative conspirator that she is. Our work ended up being published in Admit2, an online journal of collaborative work, which still pleases me, that our fun tickled someone else enough to put it out in the world.

I think about Maureen's class a great deal (particularly any time I hear the word transliminal), and the experience of building something together. It takes a certain chemistry for that to work out well, and even then, it's damn tricky. Oddly, I had the most fun not with the words, but with the piece of plywood that the three of use (Neil, Mario & I) painted while we were playing with words too. The painting was lower stress - god knows, I have no idea what I'm doing - strictly for our own amusement (well, and to have some physical element to our altar). It serves as a visual reminder of some pretty goofy conversations, an interesting starting point. I think the painting is still in Neil's garage. Gads, I hope the raccoons that keep breaking in haven't gotten to it.

Maureen & Neil's book started when they were shuttered inside during a hurricane, trapped with little to do but worry about getting blown away and write, and over several years, it grew and grew. I'm ridiculously excited to read it, as I was to read Maureen's fantastic memoir, Sex Talks to Girls. Did I remember to send her a fan letter for that? Probably not. And yet, I adored it. Sometimes my inertia / shyness grates on me.

But back to the point: the chemistry of collaboration seems, on this tiny sampling, to also require just a wee bit of stress (a deadline for class, 110 mph winds). But revealing ones' own weird little creative world generates stress too. I remember feeling outnumbered by the image hungry poets, and as a result trying too hard with my language (something I still do, overwriting, when I'm anxious or uneasy with a topic). I also remember the frustrations of simple organizing...creatives aren't known for their consistency, the phrase "like herding cats" was probably used at least once in aggravation. Still, when the time was up, we had something that each of us at least liked pieces of - not the same pieces, I can't imagine, but likeable sections for each of us.

Unlike building a bridge, there isn't a ribbon cutting ceremony when the last nail is hammered in on a poem or novel or book. There aren't blueprints, so who knows if the nails are in the right place or not. Neil told me they'd sent the book out to a couple of different places with no response, then they changed the title, and it won. Is that the way things go, if you move a nail half and inch, or pull it out and hammer in one that's longer, shorter, or a deeper color gray, and that's the difference between structural collapse? Or do you just find the right river to span, and it fits there? Who knows, and this metaphor is getting muddy, and I'm not perhaps sure what my point is. Maybe it's just that I'm happy for my friends' continuing success, and that I miss the creative energy, despite many frustrations, that colored my life in grad school. Time to go to Florida, drink some red wine, and eat some crepes.