Participated in a Five Strokes poetry happening (sorry - 60's language, but it WAS!) at SAM Thursday night. Four poets, a stack of sumi painted art critique pages, a microphone, clipboards, blank paper and pencils (no pens in the galleries, alas.) We were situated in the SAM Next room - first exhibit: photographs by Corin Hewitt that resulted from an installation he did for a week in 2007 at the Portland Art Museum. All about gesture and pasta, and I hadn't eaten any dinner.

Writing poems, gesturing towards or in the direction of poems from the words on the art critique pages and the sumi gesture paintings was not a problem, was familiar, was enjoyable. I love to write in company with other poets. We were a bit of an art installation, some on the floor, some on the gallery bench, all hunched over our writing.

Our instructions were to go to the mic and talk about the process we went through to write each poem as we completed the gesture toward a poem. This was complicated. We couldn't then read the poems aloud, but had to lay them on the floor and return to writing. I stood at the microphone, turned it on, looked out and was surrounded by other human beings - audience! - but how to connect with audience with no poem? How to talk honestly about process while trying to connect with audience with no rehearsal, no product to share? Was I supposed to pretend they weren't there? Our commentary was being broadcast in the main lobby. Was my job even to try to connect or only to report? I gave a report. I didn't look at anybody after the initial reflexive hello and smile. I felt guilty having cheated audience of an expectation that I would perform. I felt like a middle schooler. Each time I got up to present, I used larger words to explain my process, at least I felt that I did. I separated. I only marginally listened to my fellow poets present. At the end I read their poems on the floor. I was the only one to gesture at signing my name. I'd signed "lg" to my first couple of poems, then noticed nobody else was attaching attributions, so I quit. I took some of the sets home, they're beside me on this desk. Not because I wanted to save them but because I didn't want Greg to have to fuss with them, get them to recycling. Anyway, here's one of my poems. The epigraph is from the text of the page I was looking at.

"Nothing could be further
from the authentic art
of our time than the idea
of a rupture of continuity."

And I'm delighted to find
a typo on top of the second page
"an" for "and" deflating
scholarly elevation, illumination
under the watchful eye or breast,
scrumbled cloud, perhaps toupee.

***

Ciao for now.