arts & ego blog
cccp

This year’s CCCP was rather good, although I am slightly biased since I recited there and went down reasonably well. I didn't take the necessary notes to provide a review. I was too nervous before my recital, and wasn’t particularly alert after it. However, I remember being impressed by Jacqueline Risset, Cathy Wagner, Elaine Randell, Gad Hollander, Peter Riley, Tim Atkins, Astrid Lampe (brilliant, & brilliant translations by Kevin Nolan) and Niels Lyngsø. Many of the other poets were good, too; I wished, many times, to see a poem on the page.

Fortunately, I made up for my general skintness of the last few years and came back with a large number of books & chapbooks; I intend to add some reviews here over the next few months.

As an aside, I think I’m in a minority in writing poetry to be heard more than read. I regard my written poems like musical scores. I don’t put an effort into making them easy to read—especially since a good number of my poems are intentionally grammatically ambiguous, so the same words in the same order can be read differently with different meanings through different pausing and expression. I don’t want to specify one arrangement of pauses because it would deny the alternatives. All that makes the words on the page less clear to those people used to conventional reading directions.