"I've seen the best minds...."

For a couple of years in Portland in the mid-1970s I became fairly involved in poetry readings---both as a writer and as an audience/listener. I didn't read poetry; I mostly read fiction, or more accurately, prose. I had a few poems in the can but they weren't especially good enough to share except in a workshop or class. Most of the fiction I read was either in the form of short stories, fragments of longer stories, or brief, imagist one- or two-paragraph pieces that one of the other poets had dubbed "word pictures." The clipped pieces were closer to  prose poems (think Rimbaud on a bad day), but they were quite effective. I quickly discovered that not everything written for the printed page worked well as spoken word, and writings that were not especially publishable often seemed a better fit for live reading. I began to shape my material with readings in mind. I felt more like a stand-up comic, using and punching up stuff that worked, and discarding what didn't work, relying more on writings with potential to entertain, as opposed to being merely "literary."

The people who showed up at readings were often more interesting than the poems and fictions being read, and that is not to denigrate the poems and fictions---most of them were not by any means dull or poorly crafted. There were an assortment of characters and something vital about interacting with a community of poets and writers. These characters ran the gamut from the earnest academic to the raging bohemian. There were the local luminaries whom everyone turned out to see. There were older hacks still laboring unrecognized and under appreciated, and you sometimes wondered what would become of them, though you already knew. There were upper-bourgeois patrons and dabblers who veered toward the dramatic in their recitations. There were unrepentant hippies and beatniks. There were men and women of all ages, gay and straight, black and white, but mostly white. In the more informal settings many of us would get exceedingly drunk and there would arguments of great import about the merit of a certain piece, or more so regarding the worth or talents of a given writer. Sometimes one drunken poet would pick a fight with another. There were also readings where poets competed against one another---contests, slams. If you have ever read Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" he delineates these times and passions eloquently and in surgical detail, though he was dealing with Latin America and Spain, and not the U.S.

I recall one reading where I had tried out a new story that I thought was my best effort at the ripe old age of 23. The room was mostly dark and wrapped in a curtain of smoke, and I couldn't really make out any faces in an audience of 20-30 people. But at one point the room fell silent, and I had paused at a section break in my story, when I heard a female voice shout: "What a good story!" And that was enough for me. It felt like I had just done a jazz riff. I finished the story and everyone politely clapped, but I cannot describe the adrenalin surge I received from that single outburst, how in that instant everything I had done in my life with the written word was validated and affirmed. I had similar reactions reading another work.

A few months later I would tape two reading segments of 30 minutes each for the local public alternative radio station. In the second show I also included another writer. Although radio helped me reach a wider audience and gain a little notoriety, my heart wasn't in it at first. At that time I was intimidated by recording equipment, and I missed the improvising one had gotten through reading or performing live. But my radio show had started a trend: the station, having done strictly music or talk until then, was enthusiastic and soon other writers and poets were reading or recording on this station; some sharing their own work, and others reading stories or poems of mostly famous writers.

It was a time in my life I am happy and grateful to have experienced. These days you can also read your work on You Tube, and that seems fine too. I'll close this post on a personal favorite You Tube reading.

tThe Laughing Heart