Jesus, Dreams and Drugs: a review of the Plastiscene Reading Series for January 17

           

            On Sunday morning a guy attacked me with a knife. I was standing near a table with small, white plastic chairs. As he came at me I had just enough time to pick up one of the chairs to use it as a shield, with the four legs pointed in his direction.  As he thrust the knife towards me though, he hurt his arm against one of the chair legs. He held it in pain and moved away from me. Then I woke up.

            I was sleeping on Sunday when the phone rang. I wondered who the hell would be calling me at that hour of the morning. I looked at the call display and saw that it was Cad, and so I was suddenly filled with a sense of dread, because if he was calling me at that hour, something horrible must have happened. Had something bad happened to Goldie?

            “Hello!” I said.

            Cad’s voice asked me a question without a question mark: “”I guess you’re not goin to Plastiscene.”

            I was surprised by the question. “Why?” I asked.

            Her answered without an answer, “I’m here and the door is locked!”

            I suddenly realized that I’d just woken up disoriented from an afternoon nap that went longer than I’d expected.

            “What time is it?” I asked, and Cad told me it was 17:40.

            I told him that I should have left ten minutes before that but I’d get ready and head over there.

            I needed to print up a poem that I’d been working on but the HP computer I’d recently acquired seemed fixated on holding out for an incestuous relationship with the HP printer of its dreams. I had to very formally introduce it to my Brother before it begrudgingly agreed to work with it and allow it to print my poem.

            I arrived at the Victory Café fourty minutes after I’d awakened. I went upstairs but I couldn’t see Cad anywhere. I sat at the table at the front that I’d thought was his because it had a big winter coat on a chair and a glass of water on the table. It turned out to be Susie Berg’s table but she was alone and didn’t seem to mind me sitting there. I called Cad and he said he was around the corner because someone downstairs had told him that the upstairs didn’t open until 19:00. While Cad was on his way back, I signed him and myself up for the open stage.

            Cad arrived not long before Nicki went up to the microphone and began by thanking the audience for “resetting the new year with us”. She explained the concept of the poem from a hat segment of the evening, saying that there is a hat and there are poems in it. Then, since no one had volunteered to read a poem from the hat, she came down from the stage and then down the aisle, looking for a couple of people to voluntell. The first person she picked made the mistake of making eye contact with her and she told the second that he had a bit of a poetic beard, adding, “You said earlier that you weren’t prepared to read anything. Well, now you are!”

            When Nicki came back to the stage, she started talking about the word “Shibboleth”. She described how some prostitutes in England would use shibboleths to advertise through the post, with messages such as, “French lessons, half and hour” or “Large chest for sale.”

            Nicki then introduced Susie Berg, referring to her has having the quality of persistence in her role as curator of Plastiscene, and adding that if you have to choose between being good and being persistent, choose persistence.

            There was then the monthly ritual of acknowledging the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their assistance and of mildly cursing the Canada Council for not helping them.

            I was asked to perform first and I read a piece called “Killing Jar”, which speaks of post Gutenberg poetry as a species of animal that must be killed to be enjoyed in a collection. Some people laughed in the right places.

Next on the open stage was Sophie – “There were wolves in our room last night … sniffed about the bed … curious about our need for warmth … renegade joy.”

            Then came a poem from the hat written by Philip Larkin, which was read, by one of Nicki’s voluntolds. It was called “This Be the Verse” - “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you …”

            Nicki invited Cad Gold Jr. to the stage – “I married a two-cent soda schlepper … She was of peasant Italian stock … I never did nothing really bad, except I was pimpin whores on the street … She spoke broken English … I bought a new car … I didn’t buy it … It wasn’t new …”

            Continuing with the open stage was Diane – “My father wants to sing Kumbaya after his recent cancer diagnosis … I’m stuck in the past … I hear the sound of his belt …” Her second poem was based on the death of Forest Hill student, Mariam Makhniashvili, who disappeared in 2009 but whose body was found two years ago in the ravine beneath the 401 overpass near Yonge Street – “You can close Mariam’s file … signs of trauma on her seventeen year old body … step out on air, choosing your own freedom.”

            Returning to poems from the hat, we heard Kay Ryan’s “Flamingo Watching” - “ … She seems unnatural by nature—too vivid and peculiar, a structure to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity. Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act … she’s too exact and sinuous to convince an audience she’s serious …”

            Finishing up the open stage was Lisa Richter, who read a poem called “Boxing Day” – “Along the curb of St Urbain, the boxes lie in wait, each one a cast off moment of a tree …”

            Nicki told us that the difference between prose and poetry is that prose is the search for the best word, while poetry is the search for the perfect word. She then rounded out the introductory part of the evening with Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” – “ … Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light …”                        In introducing Pamela Mordecai, the first featured reader of the night, Nicki began reading from Pamela’s bio. Then she stopped and asked, “Who wrote this?” Pamela answered that she did. Nicki said, “I know, but who punctuated it? You know what a semi-colon is!”          
            Pamela began with “Reading the Poets” – “I read Walcott’s Omeros, chapter six. Helen chats with her friends down near to the sea wall. She don’t like when the tourist foreigners put their hands on her ass and so she tell the cashier he could keep the fucking job. Is just a stupid waitress work, is all! Only she now must find something to do like how she pregnant and don’t know for who … I read Larkin’s “This Be the Verse.” … It says your parents fuck you up. They do. It says that they don’t mean to. I’m less sure that absence of malevolence is true in every case … this passing on “it deepens like a coastal shelf.” … To sound the image and the ocean floor requires resonance. The same thing holds for agony.”

            Next she read “Zoe Stands Up to Shrodinger’s Cat”.

            Pamela finished with excerpts from her performance piece, “De Book of Mary”, but took a moment to introduce it. She said it is an epic poem of the life of Mary, done in Jamaican English so as to breathe new life into an old story, and so it won’t be, as our first reader said, dead on the page – She began with Mary’s visit from the Archangel Gabriel – “Howdy do? … Him send me across the great black of sky … the great one who run tings …” Pamela told us that there are traditions that say that after the crucifixion, Mary went with the apostle John Ephesus. There is still a little house where they say Mary lived. Pamela then read another excerpt, entitled “Jesus Takes Leave of Mary and Goes Into the Desert” – “Plenty hard to believe my son turn thirty dis winter season just gone! … all of a sudden dis big somebody hold you face in him hand kiss you on you forehead, say, “Mums, I going now.” Never mind how much time I protest and ask why him must go off alone to a place wid no water, no food, not a green thing to lift him spirit... “Mums,” him say “why I would leave dis house, you and Gran, best cook food in dis town … my food in de wild going be fasting and prayer, my Mums … “Why you can’t pray here, son? I will keep food and drink far from you. I will honour your fast … Him bend down and kiss me, say, “Mums, dis not de worst. Me must get ready for some dread things.” When I go to answer, him put one finger on my lip. “Hush, Mums,” him repeat, “believe me, if de choosing was mine I would stay.” … And him look round de room, touch de big water jug, scuff de rug wid him foot, take him staff and walk through de door – never turn him head round to look back.”

            Pamela Mordecai is certainly right that she breathed new life into an old story. That probably would have been true though without the use of Jamaican English, which serves more as a charming embroidery than any kind of literary tool.

            Nicki called a break, during which time Cad told me that Goldie had recently been fired from her job at the second hand furniture company where she’d been working for the last several months. The company is a Russian Jewish organization that distributes furniture to the poor. He said her Israeli Mafia boss gave her one week’s notice, but Goldie that day called into a radio show that deals with legal issues to get advice on having not been given a good reason for her dismissal.

            Also during the break, half the audience, including Pamela Modecai and her friends and family, left. On their way out though, an elderly man with a cane, who I assume is Pamela’s husband, said to me, “I really enjoyed what you read!” then he gave me a bone-crushing handshake. I guess walking with a cane is an excellent gripping exercise.

            After the break, Nicki asked us if we knew the synonym for “synonym”. Nobody knew offhand, but I guess “euphemism” comes closest.

            Nicki then made up for an oversight on her part. Apparently someone else had signed up for the open stage but Nicki had forgotten to include her, so she now called Thalia to the stage, who read – “Here I stand … my torso is an open cabinet … I break the silence by reaching out my hand. If you open it, it contains nothing, but if you let it, it will open you.”

            In introducing the second feature, Rocco De Giacomo, Nicki told us that she and Rocco are so close that they are Facebook friends!

            At this point a guy came again, as he did last time, interrupting the proceedings to look for cables in the wing of stage left. Nicki was annoyed and told him, “This is the last time!”

            Rocco De Giacomo introduced his set by saying that it would cover four topics: dreams, death, dating and babies, adding that babies are the poetic equivalent to online photos of cats.

            He started with a villanelle called “Interpreted Dreams” – “Dreams are items you can’t remember stealing … above your crow’s heart … your crow’s mind has always been one theft ahead.”

            Rocco followed the villanelle with a paradelle, which is a form invented by poet Billy Collins to parody the villanelle. The form though has begun to be used by other poets and some people actually wrote criticisms of Collins’s paradelle, saying that it was a poor example of the tradition, without realizing that Collins had created the tradition. Rocco’s offering in the form was called “Here on Mercury” – “Ride to my classroom on your pink BMX, dad … the naked girl in the kiss poster gets tangled in my legs … Beyond Mercury we don’t get out much girl … We don’t get much girl skin here … The classroom burns …”

            Rocco told us that he has a recurring dream in which he experiences sleep paralysis and his wife has to shake him awake. He said that sleep paralysis is also referred to as “the old hag” – “Be calm dear body, you cannot struggle … standing razor perfect at the foot of your bed … scream and the dust mites may hear you … an opening in your hatred … an eyeful of teeth … your ring finger twitches in a sugar bowl.”

            Moving on to the “death” themed portion of his set, he read a poem addressed to his mother – “Mom, I need it to be 1983 … I need time to make everything you whisper from your morphine drip …”

            Then for his father, “Song for the Every Day” – “ … the time he pulled poison ivy from the black earth, saying we don’t get these kinds of things, Rocco!”

            Then, “If not Cruelly” – “ … I watch my young one play on a swing set that was once his daughter’s … On the front porch, red eyed uncles sip whiskey from paper cups … my friend walks to his car carrying a small pink dress.”

            “Absolute Normality” – “ … At his daughter’s funeral someone asks, so what are you gonna do now?”

            One about his daughter – “I see Ava walking with her daycare troupe … She looks at me without recognition …”

            Rocco switched to the “dating” themed segment and told us that he had made centos from the profiles of men and women on the dating site, OKCupid. He told us that in order to keep himself unbiased he took every fifth line – “I care those who loves me … I am a normal person … Every day peels away another layer of understanding … I am a normal person … I am not some married adulterer … I am a normal person …” and from the profile of another gender – “I fantasize about being a superhero … No hipsters … I like guys who shower every day … I have inner and outer beauty … Wonder Woman was my first idol … then came Charlie’s Angels … Elegant, educated and usually wearing a stethoscope …”

            Finishing with the theme of “babies”, Rocco started with “Full Circle” – “ … city fountains are pools of crayon green …”

            Finally, “Traveller” – “You announce in our living room, Africa is another space, elephants live there … a place that is not here is in your head …”

            As is usually the case with poets, when Rocco De Giacomo is talking about the things that personally touch him he finds deep meaning and powerful language with which to express it, free of poetic forms. It seems though that when the subject matter is less close to home and therefore he has little to say about it, he reaches for a known poetic dance step with which to provide a substitute for meaning.

            The final feature was Nikki Saltz.

            She began with a poem called “The Present” – “Tomorrow, if it comes at all will be quarantined and terminal … the bed smells like you … love that is cruel as a hospice nurse eating birthday cake.”

            She followed that with “Who I Write For” – “You are my audience … You have been lying in that gown for sixteen years …”

            Nikki told us that she has a bunch of poems about Nick Cave that she wouldn’t be reading.

            Then she read a longer piece – “I was born in Johannesburg in a Whites only hospital … Peter was the garden boy … I tried to learn about flowers from him … Blacks only mugs … Apartheid fell … Suddenly everyone needed guns … Trying to rub the crime from our eyes … My heart is full of shame that is white and broken as porcelain.”

            Another piece – “I feel sad when rappers don’t make eye contact … Hot rappers don’t fuck nerdy girls … I’ll assassinate you if you use the wrong inflection …”

            “The Clock” – “I’m living the dream but the dream is dying, every breath the dream takes is the fantasy trying to believe in itself … make a vision board …before they confiscate the contraband that you create, a Berlin wall of spiritual pornography, and medication, these are the bricks of the cheap labour of your inspiration. They say there are 7 habits of highly effective people your 7 highly effective habits include: methylphenidate, Prozac, mepromabate clorazepate, diazepam„ zyprexa, vivitrol … show your belly to the cops and hope your dream is still alive and on the clock.”

            “Cough Syrup” – “Mirtazapine for lust … god for your suicidal urges … Satan for the therapist … a pine box for suggestions.”    

            “Routines and Habits” – “You need a black cloak round each eye … You need belief for the suspense … You need a soul to lose … You need a black cloak round each eye so you can see the blues.”

            “Make it Work” – “ … I string Christmas lights everywhere … today they pumped me full of Trutol … I’m the only Black woman without an ass because your grandmother was Chinese.”

            Nikki finished with a piece that contained these lines – “Today I met a wealthy old man … I asked him if he would take me to Paris … Sounds like you are looking for a cause of death … I asked him if he could entertain himself.”

            Nikki Saltz’s poetry has a visionary power that tears at the curtains of complacency.  She drags us back into the swamp of abandoned dark moments. She uses her vulnerability as a weapon of mass distraction. Sometimes though her writing seems like the rhythmless prose of a longer piece that she couldn’t finish, and which merely got called a poem just to justify its truncated state.

            Nicki Ward closed the evening by saying that we had, “manufacture community out of god knows what.”

            Cad hung around for a while, talking to Rocco about dreams and telling him that dreams are out of body experiences. Rocco told him that to achieve lucid dreaming one has to practice looking at their hands and to try to remember to do so in the dream, maintaining that attention as you move around. This is an old idea from Carlos Castaneda, who claimed to get his ideas from Native American mysticism but no aboriginal Americans corroborate any of his stories. Anyway, the idea of lucid dreaming implies that a dream is a place. A dream is only a place in the sense that Wonderland, Oz or the planet Krypton is a place. Just because one can dream that one is conscious in a dream doesn’t necessarily mean that one is conscious in the dream. According to Freud, dreams draw their material from the last three days and then the subconscious gets creative with that material to communicate the issues that are bothering it or what it is wishing for. I left Cad there and went downstairs, reading the posters on the bulletin board until Cad finally left. We walked to Bloor but Cad said it was too cold to walk to Ossington with me. I was relieved because I thought so too. In my rush to get to Plastiscene on time I had neglected to wear long-johns and the winter gloves I’d grabbed were an old pair with holes in them. Near the end of my ride home my fingertips disappeared for a while.