My mom gave me tickets to a poetry reading series. I saw Li Young Lee, Eavan Boland, Lucille Clifton, and Edward Hirsch is coming up next week. It’s been fantastic. Probably the most important part is I set that time aside and think about poetry. Oh, and I miss bedtime routine!


Li Young Lee

Li Young Lee was a mixed bag. I’ve seen him twice before and found him charming and sexy. I also adore his poetry, especially the earlier books like The Rose. This time I found several things off-putting. He dressed down—paint splattered pants, a long overcoat that he never took off or even unbuttoned, and he seemed completely disorganized, constantly shuffling his papers and telling us that he had lost his place. He also did not look at the audience. It was pretty clear body language that he was cutting himself off from us. Some of his poetry was very personal, especially the pieces about watching his father beaten, so I can guess why he needed some psychic distance, but I still had to fight myself from tossing out the label “kook” and dismissing him.

On the other hand, I was also intimidated by his depth of thought. He talked intimately about Shakespeare and Buber. I had to concentrate very hard to keep up with the philosophical bent of some of the poems. I felt I was in the presence of a great mind, but instead of absorbing what I could, I got sad that I couldn’t keep up.

He did read beautifully, and the poems that I could follow were wonderful. I’ve ordered his recent books from the library, so I can make another stab at the philosophical ones.

Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland was outstanding. Start to finish outstanding. It took my breath away. Of the four, I knew her work the least and had been to a workshop with her that I didn’t like, so I was not prepared to be wowed. She did something I thought was a big no-no in poetry readings—she gave away the punch line. Before each poem, she not only set the background but she told us the central image and explained it. You’d think that would have killed the poem, but with a couple exceptions it just let me go a few layers deeper. I felt like I got a lecture on Irish history, advice on how to write poetry, and access to gorgeous poetry all in one night.

Lucille Clifton

Before going to the series, I would have said she was my favorite of the bunch. Her The Book of Light is on my top ten books of poetry. And she’s the only one I had never heard read before, so I was really looking forward to it. I think the reading did her a disservice, at least for me. Her poems are short and accessible. They couldn’t hold up to the long stories she told before each one. The poems didn’t add anything. She also repeated herself. She’s obviously starting to lose her memory. It’s natural, but it made her come across as a sweet old grandma, not the fiery poet of race, class, gender, and spirit that I know from her work.