St. Rocco’s Reading for the Dis-Possessed, March 31

The last time I went to one of the readings in this series earlier in the month (you can check out my Blog here), one of the featured poets had been delayed due to transportation out of NYC & the reading started late -- hey, shit happens.  This time the start was delayed about 35 minutes, with organizers themselves not showing up until after the start time. In fact one of the out-ot-town features who arrived early asked me, “where is everyone?” How would I know?

Eventually the reading started started with J.P. Garcia, one of the board of organizers, doing a somewhat giggly introduction for the first reader Marty Viola-Cain. The first piece was titled, as he described it, “Bil[dung]sroman,” then a longer narrative, read fast, a memoir of high school titled “Into the Black Hole,” hard to tell if these pieces were prose or something else that may or may not have a title. The last piece he read was titled “This is My Confessional Poem,” repeating this phrase, perhaps a love poem.

Douglas Rothschild, the founder of this series, when he finally arrived was wearing a pink bunny hat, which unfortunately messed up his coiffure when he took it off.  He introduced the next reader Cara Benson with a long, rambling self-referential monologue more about him than the person he was introducing. Cara is a long-standing community member -- poet, activist, & prison-educator. As a consequence, her work combines common-place narratives of everyday life, such as “Frequency” about answering the phone from the shower & “Self Talk” at the computer, to the directly politician “Civilians” using words banned by the Trump Administration Centers for Disease Control. She ended with the more overtly “political” “What Would Emma Goldman Do?” mixing marching at the Capitol, reading at a microphone, moving to a new place, playing Scrabble, a visit to her therapist, etc. She was by far the most interesting & entertaining of the 3 readers.

The final reader was Steven Seidenberg, who read from his most recent book Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018) started at the beginning of the book. It was a heavy dose of philosophy, abstractions, written in the 3rd person, sounding like the musing of a Molloy-like character from a Beckett novel, about saying & not-saying. It made me think that if you are organizing a reading, do you want your most boring text to be the last piece, or the first?

This may be the only reading in the world named after a laundromat, & it is fitting that an event with such a Dadaist appellation would be run by impresario Doug Rothschild who, with his preternatural dark mustache & wispy comb-over, is a new-Century cartoon version of  Tristan Tzara. Watch for more in this series of readings at local coffee houses (or laundromats) near you.