I Told Super Rainbow Five to Bite the Wax Tadpole if She Wouldn’t be My Panic Sex Wig
Yesterday, Nancy and I returned home so late from my poetry reading in Kingston that I didn’t even spend the minutes necessary to sit down and relate the story of its manifestation in space and memory. Partly, this was because I was a bit tired, but the main reason was that there was too much to remember, too much to sift through. The reading was small and pleasant, but our time afterwards was richer and lasted longer than expected.
We headed out at about 12:30 in the afternoon, leaving enough time to get to Kingston even with the two stops we made on the way. Just as we made it to R&F; Handmade Paints, the site of the reading, the gates came down at the railroad crossing, and a train came blasting past, ensuring us that we’d made it as far as we needed to. R&F; Handmade Paints itself was probably my favorite of any of the sites for my readings. It is a tiny manufactory that makes encaustic paints and oil sticks. (Although R&F; has only ten employees, counting the two owners, our tour guide told us that it is the largest manufacturer of encaustics in the world—in a field that totals only three.) Besides offices and a small production area, the facility has a large studio for teaching painting and a gallery space where the poetry reading was held. Since I forgot to bring my camera to this event, I’m glad that R&F; has posted online a photograph of the gallery, which was festooned with paintings even during our reading.
What made this place so dear to me was its smells. The smell of oil paint—which tends to return me to my childhood days of stabbing a brush into a plastic concavity to mix the oil back in with the pigment to make my paint-by-number paintings—was rampant in that space. As I began the reading, my nose was still registering the scent, even in the gallery. But the other smell was of beeswax. This smell was shyer, hiding in bars of encaustic paint (the main ingredient of which is beeswax) or in tubs of granulated beeswax, but when brought to the nose it was as sweet as any honeysuckled night in Tennessee. We all live by our senses, but for me the nose takes over. The best of my experiences are enhanced by their bouquet.
Anne Gorrick invited me to this reading. I discovered, yesterday, that she started the Cadmium Text Reading Series partly as a way to meet people she wanted to meet, so this gave her an opportunity to meet me. I was gently surprised, though, by the originality of her introduction of me. Based on what she’d read of mine (she says this blog is one of her favorites), she gave a kind overview of my work as a visual poet and blogger. (I wouldn’t say that every day’s reading at this blog is the equivalent of a graduate course in visual poetry, but I at least try, most of the time, to give some insight into the field.)
I began the reading by handing out a few gifts. Normally, I produce a handout of some kind for every reading I give, but this time I simply used some of the leftovers I had. The crowd was small yesterday (thirteen, counting the two readers), which ensured I had a copy of everything for everyone:
“fiddlehuth # 1”
“foureff”
“moon lake star wave”
What I finally chose to present at yesterday’s reading was a little more eclectic than usual. I began with a pwoermd, one of the few that I think can work when spoken instead of read, then I read a month’s worth of lines from One Million Footnotes, a little blog essay of mine, a few poems in different styles, and I showed a handful of visual poems.
“seaglasseye”
One Million Footnotes, April 2005
“Wednesday’s Children”
“Q/C (QUOTIENTS/CONDUITS)”
“A word is”
“Plump cheeks”
“* * *”
“My Death is just”
“Count ercloc kwise”
“vision: exterpreting the phaistos disk”
“Poem Aslip in Mangerment”
“Aitch” and “Exx” from Analphabet
“Clay Todd Watches the Stars”
For once, I didn’t include a poemsong in this reading. I was afraid a song might take me beyond my time limit, and I thought the audience might not be a poemsong audience. I had fun loping through these few pieces in the course of about twenty minutes, then we took a break. I haven’t been to a reading before with a break in the middle of it, but it makes sense to put some space between readers, to allow for a change of styles and forms.
Susan McKechnie read after the break. Her poems were quiet and often were either directly ekphrastic or influenced by thoughts on visual arts. The images of the poems were both concretely tactile and gauzily surreal, which is a stance I tend to enjoy. Charles Simic’s work, for instance, resides inside that definition, though I noticed no strong connections between Simic’s work and Sue’s. All I can really do at poetry readings, though, is hear sounds. I cannot follow a poem’s story or understand every sentence. Words hit me and bounce off, but the structure of the poem’s sounds remains. Sue read with a soft voice (not quiet, but delicate, reserved) and clearly. The words came out of her mouth with a definite direction, too, which I realized most clearly near the end of one of her poems where she read this string of words:
(where the accents aigus mark stresses and the capitalized word is double-stressed). The last word might have wavered towards unstressed, but the quirky singsong nature of this line caught my ear—and the last is all I expect a reading to do.
My own reading style was quick. Since I never expect the reader to keep up with the words, I’m happy to dash over the words and let the sounds predominate. I picked all the poems for the yesterday’s reading yesterday morning, trying not necessarily to find the best pieces to read, but the most eclectic. My most important rule was that I could only read or present works that I hadn’t used before in a reading.
After the reading, Nancy and I stayed behind so I could buy some oil sticks for my own painted visual poems. (I hope to use them for a work-delayed project of mine.) Choosing paints was hard, a process not made easier by the fact that these were not cheap art supplies. Afterwards, we drove a few blocks to the Flow Lounge, where we met up with most of the people from the reading: Anne Gorrick and her husband Peter Genovese, Peter’s sister Teresa, their friend Steve Cotten, and Sue McKechnie and her husband. Nancy and I began our conversations at the bar with Peter, who told us all about his specialized work renovating old cars. Eventually, the three of us made it to the back of the lounge and ended up talking about everything (car racing, guitars, collecting, college admissions, names, pets, “The Sheep-Loving Man”) until about 7 o’clock. Then those remaining (Anne, Peter, Theresa, Steve, Nancy, and I) moved to a great pizza place and continued the conversation.
I can’t really recount our conversation, but let me note that, over the course of it, Steve told us about a Hong Kong friend of his whose name translated into “Super Rainbow Five,” someone (probably Steve again) noted that one possible translation of Coca-Cola is “Bite the Wax Tadpole,” and Anne noted that she had started off trying to name her poetry series “Waxing Poetics” but anagrammed that into “To Panic Sex Wig*” (which led her to imagine Valentine’s heart candies with the message “Be My Panic Sex Wig”), and Steve and Teresa merged these strands of our conversation into what has become the title of today’s blog entry. That’s the magic of a good conversation: it becomes self-referential, it develops a culture of its own, it becomes an independent entity in its own right.
Finally, Teresa noted that she had begun to create what we called dirtballs, dorodango, a Japanese form of child’s play that can result in remarkable pieces of the simplest art. As Nancy and I drove home, we were filled with memories of a great conversation and shiny balls of dirt.
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*Leading me to wonder if a merkin is a sex wig.
ecr. l’inf.
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