Michael Robins and Kate Greenstreet
Columbia College, Music Center Concert Hall
March 5, 2008

Two surefire ways to light up a literary reading: give out candy, or play to your audience. The benefit to the first is obvious (liquorice!); the second is that everyone will have a better time. As Olena Kalytiak Davis told Cranky magazine, “A reading is usually a first reaction . . . You fall very quickly away from being a ‘poet,’ like maybe a day or two after you’ve written something, and if you’re not a poet, what the hell are you doing up there in front of an audience?” This is especially true when your pockets are without candy.

Luckily, poets Michael Robins and Kate Greenstreet are from Davis’ home planet, and read dynamically and daringly. Robins, author of The Next Settlement (University of North Texas), went first. His delivery is a bit mechanical, but fits the work, which is precisely sad and prismatically beautiful. It’s the sort of thing you replay like a favorite record, and understand differently each time (“A summer better known for storm chasers, / some recalled home as the shape of corn”). Robins also read a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, (billed to read but stuck in a Buffalo snowstorm), plus bits from a new manuscript featuring circuses and the letter ‘Q.’

(After Robins’s last poem, a student towards the front started scratching his head. Backlit by stagelights, his hand and hair looked like a peacock, or else that shadow puppet kids make where the snake eats all the branches from the tree. Anyway.)

Next read Kate Greenstreet, in a charmingly chewy voice that you can hear here. Greenstreet treats poems like crazy friends or still-evolving things, stopping often to give context or crack jokes. When reading from “Great Women of Science,” the first cycle in case sensitive (Ahsahta Press), Greensteet tripped on a line about a fortune teller wearing hot pink. It reminded her of a friend in the audience, and afterwards, she said so. There’s a double-art there: one in writing a good poem, and another in performing it well, then gauging the response. Right then, I ducked into the lobby to buy Greenstreet’s book, which has water on the cover and other cycles inside, cycles on love, the body, and salt. It hasn’t left my bedside since.

Finally, someone in the audience asked Proverbial Question #3: “What poems do you like?” Both poets rattled off quick lists and a few caveats, then talked about structure. “What I really like,” Robins said, “are poems where the whole thing is in past tense, then suddenly one line switches to the present.” It’s a lovely metaphor, and works for process and product both (Davis too). At this point, the audience was so engaged that they clearly didn’t mind the lack of sweets.

Mairead Case writes for, and curates, Fabulous Color. She lives in Pilsen.