Third Man Books Kicks Off National Poetry Month With a Poetry Sucks! Launch Party for Janaka Stucky's The Truth Is We Are Perfect
Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz
Milling around inside and outside the curiosity shop in the space in front of the East Room. Browsing the mounted heads of elk, caribou and other members of the family cervidae, human skulls, bugs I'd just as soon see under glass. The P.A. pumped goth tunes. Chet Weise called things to order around 7:30, reading "Slow Music" by Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, who died last week at 84. Weise identified Tranströmer as "one of the guys who fought the good fight ... and won"
Like a good concert, plenty of variety to the bill and a quick pace. The store's counter served as a merch table.
Local fiction author Lee Connell read from a series investigating how adolescent obsession affects emerging personality, through the prism of two teenage girls immersed in a fantasy series about space ponies, or more specifically winged, mono-horned space horses called Pegaterrestrials.
The main cause for celebration is Janaka Stucky, whose new volume of poetry The Truth Is We Are Perfect is Third Man Books' first single-author title. Stucky is also a publisher, chief of the imprint Black Ocean, and he introduced two touring readers who he's published: D.J. Dolack and S. Whitney Holmes, whose collection The Room Where I Get What I Want had also just been printed — she held the first copy in her hands today.
Holmes' work explores what happens when you revel in the self. That can turn really ugly. There's a difference between reveling and wallowing — the book brings it to an end.
Dolack read an excerpt from a poem called "Book of Light Book of Light" which he'd had printed on newspaper. It was a nice bookend to Holmes' pieces, about consciousness and perception of what's outside us, finding meaning in the vast array of information and stimuli in constant swirl.
EQUALITYISAFALSEGOD sent a series of samples looping and echoing through a labyrinth of effects pedals. Harsh noises turned hypnotic. Unconsciously, I tapped my heel in time.
Stucky read next. Like Dolack, his delivery came like a monologue rather than a reading, and reminded me of Laurie Anderson, ending passages on a devastating summation. He ended with "Recreating a Miraculous Object," a stream of consciousness poem growing in speed and intensity to match the growing strength of the narrator's conviction. He tapped his heel.
Laura Birdsall, also a local fiction writer, read the beginning of a longer work in progress. Like Connell's, it also looked back into the characters' past. Kind of like Waiting for Godot, Two grown women are stuck in a Moroccan train station, waiting for a train that doesn't seem to be coming, telling stories from their childhood to while away the time. Each invites the other to rate how unnerving or disturbing the story is, using the other's perception to clarify her own.
Daniel Pujol read last. Most locals know him as the leader of the band PUJOL. Weise is right to have as a pet peeve the labeling of a person by their profession. Pujol's poems do relate to his songs because they cover the same intellectual territory: trying to carve out space for contemplation and critical thinking in the contemporary hyper-stimulated experience.
Harvest Team closed out the night. I've only heard their instrumentals, but here was a small piece of post-apocalyptic theater, a morality play about sacrificing yourself to the soul of the spiritual machine, being hollowed out by what is dehumanizing. Two synthesists, wearing black rubber gloves and Terminator shades, created an undulating soundscape while frontman Reid Campbell, looking a bit like Bill Pullman in Independence Day, paced and unleashed a litany through a speaker that might have been decommissioned from a train station or a factory.
Jim Jarmusch stood in the back of the room, as inconspicuous and nonchalant as a six-foot-four guy with a foot-tall white pompadour can be. On my way out, I overheard him asking if anyone knew whether Link Wray's name was short for Lincoln or not.
— Stephen Trageser, Nashville Scene
