Poetry Thursdays at Russell Sage College, October 26

This is a new series at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY, coordinated & hosted by Matthew Klane, that started in September. This night the readers were Travis Macdonald & Iris Cushing, with a post-reading discussion, in the Carol Ann Donahue Poetry Room of the Shea Learning Center.

Travis Macdonald is the author of 2 books of procedural poetry, The O Mission Repo (Fact-Simile, 2008), an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report & N7ostrdamus (BlazeVOX, 2010), a N+7 treatment of Nostradamus’ quatrains. He is also an editor at the journal Fact-Simile, where you can find the work of Matthew Klane (& James Belflower in the current issue). He read from The O Mission Repo from a treatment of the preface. Then on to a piece titled “How to Zing the Government.” While his reading was rather flat in tone, as is appropriate to the nature of the text I suppose, some of the phrases were surprising in their random (supposedly) meaning.

Iris Cushing had a high-tech glitch in the middle of her reading, the equivalent of leaving home with the wrong folder of poems. But she recovered & performed a couple of her karaoke poems, playing the tunes that inspired them on her smart phone, a political “That Man I Can’t Stand” (to “I Can’t Stand the Thought”) & another to the tune “All She Ever Wants to Do is Dance.” I would have liked to have heard her “2 Truths & a Lie” but, she said, she had sent herself a student essay instead. It was fun just the same.

The discussion after the reading was tedious, as these often are, burdened by some audience members making long statements (i.e., showing off) about what they think/believe rather than asking questions or engaging in discussion with the guest readers. I usually leave at this point but was trapped there. But there were some probing questions on music (for Iris), & enlightening responses from Travis about the why & how of using The 9/11 Commission Report (an old copy he picked up in a used-book store).

There is one more of these at the end of November &, hopefully, more in the coming semester, part of a poetry renaissance in Troy.