Poets are Screeching In The Trees
I value poetry as a forum, a social site where cultural politics can be dreamt and acted almost in the same instant, but I hate poetry “readings.” More troublesome, is that I don’t really know why. On January 11, 1954, under the pseudonym Oliver Charming, Jack Spicer wrote: “The angel keeps screeching in the tree. It is behaving more and more like a bird. We are doing something wrong….Perhaps it isn’t our angel.” There is something about this wild performance—“The angel keeps screeching in the tree”—and the potential for misreading it—“Perhaps it isn’t our angel”—that allegorizes my distaste for poetry readings.
Poets are screeching in the trees at readings. They set themselves apart from the rest of us; behind a lectern shuffling their papers, and into a microphone, poets sing their inscrutable songs. We, the audience: wait, listen, release gasps of pleasure, laugh or chuckle privately pleased at something, detect the many songs within a song and all the while apotheosize the bird who has found very deftly its tree. We want the bird to be our angel; we want an hour or 45 minutes in the ken of genius; but, “We are doing something wrong.”
We have misheard the song; we have placed the bird in the tree ourselves and prodded it to sing so we could have a song to misread. Or worse, we don’t even hear the song. To wit, this absurdity compels our conviction to believe in its validity. The secret vice is our conviction that a bird in the tree can and must be heard as an angel, a soothsayer, a terrible apparition. We will punctuation onto experience and poets happily oblige. If this was a village and the walls were burning we would pause to hear the birds screeching because their wings were on fire. “The fire needs a campaign song.” But, as Oliver Charming warns: “There is only the angel in the tree outside—who may be the wrong angel—and then acres of empty television sets and children.”
What about those “acres of empty television sets and children” though? What are they doing so far away from the fire of the bird’s song? Is this an un-collapsible distance necessary for the immediacy of our misreading? Must we void so much to get so little in return?
I’m okay with the incomprehension of my motivations and inclinations. I think therein lies a possibility for shifting the landscape of interpretation into an indeterminate future. Metaphor bridges logical gaps, and where are we going tonight anyway? Who’s reading? The bird or the angel?
I value poetry as a forum, a social site where cultural politics can be dreamt and acted almost in the same instant, but I hate poetry “readings.” More troublesome, is that I don’t really know why. On January 11, 1954, under the pseudonym Oliver Charming, Jack Spicer wrote: “The angel keeps screeching in the tree. It is behaving more and more like a bird. We are doing something wrong….Perhaps it isn’t our angel.” There is something about this wild performance—“The angel keeps screeching in the tree”—and the potential for misreading it—“Perhaps it isn’t our angel”—that allegorizes my distaste for poetry readings.
Poets are screeching in the trees at readings. They set themselves apart from the rest of us; behind a lectern shuffling their papers, and into a microphone, poets sing their inscrutable songs. We, the audience: wait, listen, release gasps of pleasure, laugh or chuckle privately pleased at something, detect the many songs within a song and all the while apotheosize the bird who has found very deftly its tree. We want the bird to be our angel; we want an hour or 45 minutes in the ken of genius; but, “We are doing something wrong.”
We have misheard the song; we have placed the bird in the tree ourselves and prodded it to sing so we could have a song to misread. Or worse, we don’t even hear the song. To wit, this absurdity compels our conviction to believe in its validity. The secret vice is our conviction that a bird in the tree can and must be heard as an angel, a soothsayer, a terrible apparition. We will punctuation onto experience and poets happily oblige. If this was a village and the walls were burning we would pause to hear the birds screeching because their wings were on fire. “The fire needs a campaign song.” But, as Oliver Charming warns: “There is only the angel in the tree outside—who may be the wrong angel—and then acres of empty television sets and children.”
What about those “acres of empty television sets and children” though? What are they doing so far away from the fire of the bird’s song? Is this an un-collapsible distance necessary for the immediacy of our misreading? Must we void so much to get so little in return?
I’m okay with the incomprehension of my motivations and inclinations. I think therein lies a possibility for shifting the landscape of interpretation into an indeterminate future. Metaphor bridges logical gaps, and where are we going tonight anyway? Who’s reading? The bird or the angel?
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