Riding the L train to Brooklyn is always entertaining. Hipsters are everywhere with their cuffed jeans, ‘80’s mullets, and stand-up basses. Somebody’s usually singing or reading Marx, you just never know what you’re going to see. Craning my head around a modelesque bleached blonde, I take down a quote on the Subtalk advertisement from the New York Public Library: “The gaunt trestle-work of the els brings twilight to miles of streets, the tunnels of subways honeycomb rocks and rivers and skyscrapers. The trains are the first things a good many New Yorkers observe in the morning and the last a good many more remember at night.” I take it to be a good omen for a night of poetry.
Brooklyn always feels closer to the concrete than Manhattan-- there’s something tangible about it that feels rough and jagged. On Lorimer Street bored looking perfectly square vinyl-sided houses are juxtaposed with chic chrome bakeries and graffitied shacks. Pete’s Candy Store is the quintessential ironic Brooklyn chic; it’s an older building with character. The lettering is faded and dusty as if it hasn’t been replaced since the 1950’s when the Coca-Cola signs that flank the lettering were still shiny. Inside it simply gets better. The beautiful hard wood bar glimmers in the dim lighting, and candles rest on every little table. It’s inexplicably romantic, and entirely genuine. It feels like part of the Old World; the colors are soft-- gold, red, and brown.
As I entered the performance room, I was reminded forcibly of entering an old subway car. The ceiling is curved into a dome, a line of thin, elegant red plastic tables with black chairs span the length of each wall. The walls are decorated with particle board trays used for stacking heavy things in hardware stores. In the combined low wattage of candle light and tiny globes, the particle board looks like lovely cork, with incredible texture and a warm golden hue. The decor is resourcefulness at it’s best.
The stage itself is completely old school. On the back wall of the stage and on the marquee above, is an old bronze honeycomb grate. The marquee is ringed with small globe lights like a 1950‘s theater. The red walls and the burgundy wallpaper specked with gold are in beautiful contrast with the scarred black floor of the elevated stage. There’s a microphone, a drum set, and a rusted red pail filled with wires onstage. The room is packed full of people with notebooks and copies of No, Dear’s 6th issue, Pit. Dorthea Lasky, the curator for Pete’s Candy Store, steps onstage in her signature dark, thick, framed glasses and spontaneous earrings. She introduces one of the editors of No Dear, Alex Cuff.
Alex welcomes everyone and calls the first poet onstage. Curtis Jensen is taller than the microphone with a gruff, sandy voice. He begins with his poem “Eden,” and as he reads, you can tell he doesn’t exactly like public speaking. He’s one of the more modest poets, content to write, not eager to perform. He doesn’t speak in an elevated poet voice, he just reads. The natural feel is refreshing, but a little hurried. Jensen reads three poems, all of which show a fondness for scientific language, and ideas about religion. One line stands out in its repetition in the poem “Inventory:” “We each in agency choose obedience.”
The next poet is Eric Pitra, a techno musician who is also a poet. He begins with a song written by his girlfriend’s four year old nephew, and it is absolutely amazing. Pitra recognized the poetry in the freedom of a child’s unfettered thoughts, the poem he reads “Adult/Child” engages this idea. He reads well, with humor and a child-like naivety. Pitra likes to perform and you can hear the influence of a musician’s concern for sound in his poem. He is followed by Katie Clemente, a poet born and raised in Brooklyn, she is completely natural and open as she reads “thingstotuckaway.” It’s a beautiful Native New Yorker poem, drawing attention to concerns about concrete and fig trees protected from the winter by garbage pails. There’s Brooklyn pride and weariness in her voice as she reads. The line, “hourly I finger magazine edges and look at log cabins which seem so appealing though I’ve never been camping” is striking (I grew up in the country where camping was as common as runny noses in winter).
Jared White takes the stage next with “La Cucracha,” a poem about a rather strange fruit called the calabash. He highlights the comedy within the complex imagery and sends the audience into fits of giggles: “I offer/ Shoulders, which is to say, male breasts. They can be legally shown/ Even to children.” He reads like a dead pan comedian, seemingly effortless and perfectly staged. Jen Hyde comes after White, reading her poem in No, Dear and a selection from her Wave No. series. Her voice is rounded and full when she reads, with a slight monotone that echoes like a wave. Her reading style suits her poems, but could become distracting, too meditative.
During the break, every one heads to the bar to buy some spiced cider or Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can. The first poet after the break is Andrew Reynolds, an experimental poet with a love affair with science. He reads his poems “The Iceman” and “Reprise, the Iceman,” about a human skeleton found frozen with all his belongings, in the Alps, “a 5,00 year old crime scene.” The poems are read as they are written: quiet, pensive, and snow covered soft. Lauren Nicole Nixon follows Reynolds. She has a completely different style, much more performative, a product refined by NYU’s Tisch school of the arts. She brings a powerful reverberating presence onstage with her poem “Building/Unbuilding.” It’s a strong poem with all the conflicts of childhood and womanhood encapsulated in a line, “They’ve convinced you of the fall, but I’m telling you,/ they’re wrong.”
Anelise Chen walks onstage hunched over and twitching tense. She reads quickly in an escalating tone that is self-propelled by mounting anxiety. Her prose poems are absolutely hilarious, neurotic, and obsessive. One poem is a never ending interrogation of how writers stay thin, how people who think too much will never be good athletes, WHY, WHY? she asks relentlessly. She leads us on a hilarious jaunt through her expeditions on google in search of something happy, “I googled baby animals cute.” Leaving no doubt of her talents, she abruptly leaves the stage for the final poet, Joseph Calavenna.
Calavenna’s poems are austere and carefully beautiful. He focuses on colors and reads with excellent pacing and pauses, like a professional. Arguably the most skillful use of imagery in any poem featured in this issue of No, Dear appears in his poem “x”: “a bag of red marbles arrived from Paris/ the note said hello in French// I asked you to translate/ then poured the marbles on the floor.”
At the end of the poem, there is a moment of silence, before the buzzing of the room.
The reading ends, and we’re all reminded that we’re in Brooklyn, living inside poems spoken aloud to echo in a room full of writers.
