Pomp Poetry: Wishful Weekends

Lately, my weekdays have been nauseous with deadlines, applications, schoolwork and other measures to ensure I’m not homeless come June.

As a break from my overcaffeinated workweek, I switched to liquor for the weekend.
On Friday, Whiskey, Diet Coke and I had a glorious reunion. It was at a party downtown with chandeliers and Courvoisier, two c-words that enter my vocabulary with much less frequency than “Colt 45” or “Cunt Circus.”

The night ended with intense PDA in the Union Square station, followed by falling asleep without sheets on my bed.
On Saturday, I woke up at 4 p.m. with a headache, wrote a Political Science paper and ate an Ess-a-Bagel. Then I got on the L to Bushwick, to meet Royal at Café Orwell for the Crowd reading series.

I’m a poet who typically hates poetry readings. But I like wine, and Crowd has a lot of it. This time around, they also had a bottle of Tequila and a poet with a cool name: Macgregor Card. He also edits The Germ.


I could attribute my fondness for Card’s poetry to his stage presence, his spasmodic delivery (does he not know all poets are required to speak in pretentious monotones?), the liquor in my system, or the fact that he’s from Brooklyn. But his poems were also the most idiosyncratic and fun (consequently, the only ones I remember).
He’s one of those poets you can enjoy line-by-line or stanza-by-stanza. “Spasmodic Tragedy” had a lot of short ones, like:
“It doesn’t take a jerk
to lose count in the dark
to jerk off all the lights
everywhere I shiver”

and

“I came to you
in hope that lights need
screwing down a hall
beauty of a ladder on all fours
everywhere at once”

Another Card poem I enjoyed was called…”Poem”:

I crow the verdant lake surf, crow
Can’t deseltzer lake of tourists into reed regatas
Out-disturb supposed gull, ex-garralous tit
Can’t resolve to cleat the former wild familiar neck
A call for drastic woolly cadillac to ease
A load of cans into estate-pie, hurry
Beach the silver and stunt-silver
Be like painter, nature’s own subultimate decider
Hang it on the beach, an actual sober beach
Where is she at, auratic solemnpuss my love
As all best cameos enfronded
Far from single hitch of my decelerrating tug
The surf I crow, self-prickery’s rushed sum
Of reasonable tics, stroke, stroke, stroke
And crow, stroke and actually crow
Like tourist through like travelled recitation, crow

On Sunday, I needed a sober beach. I drank a lot of water and wrote internship cover letters. I met Daniel at work and we ate French food. I prayed that the weekend could be just a weekend longer.

I woke up in Brooklyn to a Mazzy Star ringtone, reluctantly ready for another Monday.

-Hannah Miet

Desperately Seeking SITE

7 p.m. - CROWD Reading Series (http://www.crowdyourself.blogspot.com/)

On the walk over to Café Orwell (http://bushwickbk.com/2008/12/19/cafe-orwell-opens-in-morgantown/), I ran into a couple with SITE map in hand, looking for something to do. When I told them I was going to a poetry reading, they shook their heads firmly in unison.

“I have nothing against poetry, per say,” said the woman. “It’s just that bad poetry is the worst art form imaginable.”
I can’t help but share this sentiment. A bad painting, you can look away from. A bad film, you can laugh at. But the inescapable horror of having to sit through a bad poem will stick in your system.

This is what I discussed with Daniel while we waited for CROWD to begin. “Poetry and music,” he said “are the two art forms where the bad significantly outweighs the good.”

Lucky for us, Bill Rasmovicz read that night, a poet who happens to fit the slim categories of unpretentious and “good.” There was also a lot of free wine, which facilitated our enjoyment of his words.



“I swallowed the black pill of childhood” (http://billrasmovicz.blogspot.com/2007/06/newish-poem.html) was my favorite. His book, The World In Place of Itself (Alice James Books, 2007) has several other poems with equally awesome titles, like “RULES FOR A SEMI-AUSPICIOUS LIFE” and “PORTRAIT OF THE MAN TRYING TO SHED ENOUGH MASS TO FLY.”

10:30 p.m.-The Brooklyn What (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=98392540) took their shirts off on stage, as they played their first song “I don’t Want to go to Williamsburg.”




I can’t really think of a better introduction to IOSOUND, the music component of SITE, held at Goodbye Blue Monday (www.goodbye-blue-monday.com/).

I will let this video speak for itself :



12 a.m. -The Rhodes (http://www.myspace.com/therhodesmusic) appeared to be your run-of-the-mill band still wearing ties and riding The Strokes’ wave. But appearances can be deceiving.



Their punchy songs like “Call me” and “Shakedown” had a ‘50s spin that wasn’t trying too hard, and convinced me they could actually play their instruments pretty damn well. However, it was their cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” that truly won me over.

12:30 a.m.-Ava Luna (http://www.myspace.com/avalunaband) are my new obsession.



Frontman Carlos Hernandez’s lyrics are backed up by three females with gospel-like voices: Felicia Douglass, Mira Leytes, and the truly soulful Siheun Song. Add Alex Smith on drums and Nathan Thompkins on synthesizer, and you get one of the most unique cross-genre bands I have seen in a long time.

Ava Luna are back at Blue Monday on Saturday the 14th, at 9 p.m., so you should check them out (i.e. fall in love with them).



Bushwick is an obvious location for an art festival. It is the home of factories remodeled into artists lofts, innovative street art, hipster house parties, and arguably the most plentiful number of three piece bands to come out of a single neighborhood (other than Williamsburg). And, oh yeah, there’s also those people that originally lived there.

I approached SITE fest void of expectation, so as not to be disappointed by stodgy sonnets or bands that have mastery over two power chords (and not much else). But from what I saw on Saturday, the festival, unlike music and poetry as a whole, has a favorable good-to-bad ratio.

Bushwick, I’m impressed.

-Hannah Miet