Pamenar Reading Series | 4 |  22 March 2022 

Collective Book Launch with Jackqueline Frost, Fran Lock , Anne Waldman & Emma Gomis,
Sally-Shakti Willow

By Cris Cheek

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There did use to be the occasion for reporting on and reviewing events in poetry considered to be of significance—by their author. What follow is one such instance, although the shape and field of networked events among poetry communities has come under substantive pressures during lockdown. Maybe that will have the effect of revitalising the genre of the “reading.” Too many readings had begun to settle into a dull format. Poets standing behind a podium, relatively flat tonal dynamics and soporific affect.

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The fact that poetry events flourished on the flat screen during lockdown is to be celebrated. A person might say that a bad thing also happened to poetry events during lockdown. The good thing disguised it. Anybody with the link could associate, go to hear readings and because of the platform they could be archived (that is all good and really ought to be worked to be retained). But the bad thing was that poets all too often sat down, flaunting their libraries. Too many poets (that I heard and saw) chose to be the talking head sat at the desk (commanders on the holodeck or unquestioning engineers of workstation), and a further disembodiment of voices occurred. 

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Event organisers please note --- make local events available and accessible to those who cannot be there at that time in as many instances as possible. Distance is an obvious preventer, so too work schedules, other commitments and accessibility issues. “We” need to make more events hybrid—live and streamed—in which “performers” — and the reading of a poem is a performance after all — acknowledge that their presence is both in this space in the here and the now, and also mediated.

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In their desire for intimacy and amazed at the emergent technocracy poets got fluffy in a search for the simulacrum of connection. In some cases they abandoned being fierce - became too salon sweet. I know that has not always been the case throughout the pandemic on zoom, but enough so. There was not insufficient thought and action going into a sense of mise en scene and of how sitting down impacts vocal delivery.

i fell into the trap too. There were probably numerous exceptions that I missed but I did attend a tremendous online multiple book launch from Pamenar Press put together by editor, publisher and poet the sparkling Ghazal Mosadeq during which some of those who were reading stood up, even moved about a bit and more. Odd to "review" a reading but i took some screen grabs of the occasion and am celebrating the press, their publications and this presentation here. The editorial focus of Pamenar is strong.

There was a delicious and at times vertiginous split screen bi-lingual reading in Catalan & English,  with two poets reading at the same time frequently (Anne Waldman & Emma Gomis) not simply one after the other. That was a joy to hear! The roughness and raw improvisational energy in their exploration of such a sensation of thought of as sensation hung in the air with Anne and Emma looking at one another with pleasure in reflective pleasure across the split between their screens acknowledge their successful charge. They read their text and their text read them.    

"A Punch in the Gut of a Star" speaks to everyone who has gone through the past few years. Those who have feared breathing the air and who have been cautious of the poisonous surfaces of all things. These poems layer our pandemic fears and juxtaposes them on the page while paying close attention to the binaries of translation and numerical marks between the two languages of the book. A Punch in the Gut of a Star is being adopted into a film-in-progress by Ed Bowes, titled “shoot.” 

Jack Frost delivered from her new book "Young Americans" with barbed precision but also showed the view out of her window onto Paris by night that split between the more intimate and the more panoptical public critique in her diction. For emphasis Jack leaned in with a wicked air of bitter critique, cutting the furry away from the her computer’s mic with a dark wit that shivered cliché.  

"Young Americans" traces ‘the tragedy of feeling’ inside the ‘fragile world of civil loves,’ reaching down from the ‘proletarian night’ of the Mississippi delta toward that ‘other America,’ as Édouard Glissant called it. Author Mira Mattar writes, ‘Sprawling, but taut, and open with mourning, searching for a word for “exit” — these poems are penned from within the furious ache of the present’s “sad hour” looking back at a future that didn’t happen.’

Sally-Shakti Willow opened her room (very much staged and mise en scene) as a writing and drawing and reading space — a scene of mark making — and i really appreciated the sense that Sally brought of a temporal patient "room" to be read and read in. She waited in a freighting room. She slowed everything down — not everybody’s bag — wove a waiting and excercising “on” and “off” together to the extent that the “on” and “off” states interfused to a productive degree.

"Leela in Lockdown" juxtaposes her constraint based mesostics with densely scribbled notebook pages, to present a comforting expression of our whirlwind covid reality.

And then Fran Lock crouched in a claustrophobic space to deliver a scorching set from my favorite poetry book of last year, "Hyena! Jackal! Dog!" Her writing reaches a place where poetry very rarely treads. Fran’s delivery scorches our expectations around rhetorical politeness and lays down the call to urgent hands and compelling instruments. The reading confirmed the arrival of a major Irish poet.

The Hyena! poems are concerned with therianthropy – the magical transformation of people into animals – as a metaphor for the embodied effects of sudden and traumatic loss. Through the figure of Hyena! Fran negotiates the multiple fraught intersections of dirty animality, femininity, grief, class and culture to produce a work of queer mourning, a furious feral lament. Hyenas in legend and lore are shape-shifters, and Fran's work has been said to shape-shift between lyric and innovative modes, fiercely concerned with the expansion of "innovative" to include the kinds of poetry and performance strategy typically accessible to and practiced by working-class and marginalised people.

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I hit the "Leave" button feeling braced and refreshed and excited about poetry again.

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