Ariana Reines, who wrote The Cow and Coeur de Lion, is a poet I like quite a bit. Jezebel is a woman-oriented culture blog that I used to like until they lost some of their good writers, lost their sense of humor, and started calling everything offensive to women, whether it is or not.
So maybe there’s a tinge of hypocrisy in this experience a Jezebel writer had at one of Reines’ poetry readings. The piece starts out on a bad note when the writer, Jenna Sauers, admits that she dislikes most poetry, and poets, for that matter. “I remain fundamentally very suspicious of any class of writer that considers a day when you come up with five lines to be the blistering height of productivity,” she says.
Still, she likes Reines’ poetry and she and her friends laugh at several points during the poem, which is titled, “When I Looked At Your Cock, My Imagination Died.” Therein begins the problem. See, Reines’ poem is very graphic in the way it talks about sex. It also contains some funny lines, like, “When I fuck you, I mean when I get banged, my tits like greased basketballs, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.” So Jenna, her male friend, and possibly others laughed at these moments in the poem. Afterwards, a woman who turned out to be the poet Nada Gordon, did the following:
Then a woman across the aisle from me shot me and my two friends — also, full disclosure, periodic laughers — a withering look. “So,” she said. “I found myself really uncomfortable with the laughter during the part of your, um, you know, the, the sexier sections? Which I found, you know, powerful and formal and — all this other stuff going on. And I understand that laughter is something that naturally emerges in such situations, and it’s — but I just wanted to call attention to my discomfort.” There was silence, and then the audience went apeshit. (Or at least the most apeshit I have ever seen at a reading.)
By apeshit, I suppose Jenna means that several people spoke up that it bothered them too, including poet Eileen Myles, and then Jenna and her friends defended themselves, and finally Reines put a stop to it and read from her translation of Baudelaire. You can hear the entire exchange, not to mention the poetry, here.
It’s a fascinating situation. It brings to mind all kinds of issues, like the impossible-to-settle high and low art debate, acceptable reactions to graphic talk of sex and pornography (what is “mature” or not), gender dynamics, stereotypes about poets, and what reactions to art are okay to have. I have a couple of thoughts:
a. Jenna and her friends were perfectly right to laugh. The poem is funny! Not all the time, but often, and laughing seems a reasonable reaction to it. Eileen Myles wrote a long, somewhat bizarre response to Jenna’s post, where she says that Jenna is living a consumerist lifestyle and then says that Myles and her friends are intellectuals and that Jenna is “with the big dogs now, little puppy.” Aside from that, her point seems to be that the male friend with Jenna was laughing loudly and drawing attention to himself, and Myles interpreted that as his trying to hide his discomfort with all the sex-talk. “But your guy friend was doing that thing people who want everyone to know they REALLY GET IT do. The gross dominating laughter. It was like okay dude you’re all excited about the dirty talk,” she said.
I listened to the recording. The laughter didn’t seem particularly loud or dominated by one person, but maybe it was different if you were there. But even if it were, as someone who sometimes finds things inappropriately funny, it’s a little weird that his reaction to the poem was so harshly judged. There should be room for many reactions to poetry, especially if they are all positive, as was the case at this reading.
b. Q&A’s are painful. There’s always someone who has to give an irrelevant opinion or ask a dumb question, and it’s just something we all have to get through so that we can feel we’ve had a dialogue and that this is a literary event instead of a performance. I’m not saying that Nada Gordon said something dumb. I am just saying that everyone has their opinions at these events, and there is usually someone who wants to go off-topic or draw attention to other issues, and we all have to deal with it. It is the nature of readings. Jenna apparently needs to go to more of them to learn this. I hope she does. She lives in New York, after all.
c. I would be fascinated to hear what Reines thinks of the situation, but she’s probably smarter to keep her mouth shut.
