SPT Reading 10/7

On Sunday I went to the Small Press Traffic to see Jai Arun Ravine, Michelle Naka Pierce and Meg Day. This is part of the SPT season theme of Genders/Bodies/Hybrids. All three of these poets/performers are coming from really interesting places of hybridity and "inbetweenity" (a term I learned at the reading). Jai Arun Ravine is a mixed race thai american trans masculine dancer, performer and text maker. Michelle Naka Pierce was born in Japan to one Japanese and one white parent, and teaches at the Naropa school. Meg Day, a white working class queer graduate of Mills, who is a coda (child of deaf parents) - more of that later.

The room was amazingly empty. Granted, there were a million and a half things going on in SF last weekend. But there were literally ten or 12 people in the audience, four of which had come with one or the other of the readers. And for whatever reason, it made me think immediately of the ways that poets in general, poets of color in particular, and poets who carry a burden of responsibility while choosing experimental styles have very few places/audiences which embrace them. It made me think about access. Because these are good poets. Michelle Naka, is pretty well known, Jai and Meg are local (or once local) and really captivating performers.

But I also thought a lot about the audience that SPT attracts/reaches out to. From what I know, which isn't that much, it is a small bay area experimental poetry world, sometimes with really well known readers, and sometimes with less known gems. And if the readings I've been to say anything, it is certainly a mostly white crowd. All this was buzzing around in my head before anyone even started reading.

So Michelle begins. And she reads from a really beautiful book, which is partially in response to Rothko Seagram's paintings, and mostly a meditation on liminal space. Her book blurb describes it as a book that "reflect[s] unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these "invisible" cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze." Michelle invitied Jai (a dancer by training) to move while she read. Jai (who calls out - I'm also a hybrid!) initially takes a seat in a corner, waiting for Michelle to begin. As the interruptions and juxtaposed images were voiced, as Michelle read lines like "can you reclaim mongrel," "what is the value of invisibility if not invisible on the road," and "the symptom of color," Jai leaned and fell and pulled themself around, sometimes hanging from joists in the ceiling and sometimes leaning against the podium where Michelle read from. 

It was really beautiful, to see the conversation happening, one part spoken out, the other taken in and responding somatically. And I was almost totally captivated. Except Michelle held the book up over her face, and spoke very quietly never looking up. And I couldn't find a reason to most of Jai's movements, even while I appreciated the gesture. And the feeling in the room was peculiar, hard to say what, exactly, until Michelle stopped reading and Jai took the stage.

Jai's interests are in Thailand as a place that white men go to "get lost in." They are interested in investigating their own relationship to Thailand and Thai culture and Thai-trans-masculenity while unpacking the imperialist othering of their homeland. The poems they read were satirical comments - mash-ups of American movies based in Thailand featuring Brad Pitt running along a beach, stopping for a drink at the Brokedown Palace Restaurant where Claire Danes works as a waitress. There were some tender poems, too, of searching for a place for themselves and feeling trampled by the white male desire to get lost in the beautiful wilds of Thailand. Conceptually I was really into it, although not at much into the actual poetry. 

Like I said, Jai is a performer. So they performed the poems, wanting to engage with the audience. Asking us how we were, looking for verbal feedback, laughs, something. But the audience was really really quiet. Like we had been trained that it was not what we were supposed to do - respond back - and Jai was obviously feeling weird about the silence. "Come on, you know what I mean?" they said. There was a group of 4 white men in the front two rows who'd come together, each sitting a seat apart (so as not to appear to intimate) and who barely batted an eyelash the whole performance. Behind them it felt actually like there was a wall that I couldn't get through to make contact with Jai, working hard up there. I thought a lot about it afterwards - the performer looking for recognition from the audience, for some sign of life, and getting crickets, and how very culturally and racially and "poetry aesthetic/school"-ed that is. 

Meg Day blew me away. She read a paper on Implant Poetics and Deaf poetics, talking about deaf communities as a separate cultural group, "sometimes considered an ethnicity although this gets tricky" and the ways that people who go in and out of deaf and hearing culture work in the liminal spaces, how bilingualism in English and ASL affect a writer. She, too, got almost no audience participation though she searched for it. Well, Jai, who sat down in the first row, called out a bunch of times, making me really happy.