Sunday, July 15th, 2007; Myopic Bookstore; Featuring Brandi Homan, Becca Klaver, Mark Tardi, Daniel Borzutsky

Photos by: Danielle Scruggs
Written by: Maren Robinson

Myopic is one of those cozy independents with a long history, a loyal following, and a series of paintings of the storefront hanging on the wall behind the register to prove it. I found the store cat, Lenny, sleeping on the squishy balcony (which may be held up by books from the floor below) beneath titles by Robertson Davies. It is one of those homey bookshops to blow into on a cold day and find a 1930s garden book you want in spite of not having a garden.

Myopic also provided the warm-weather venue for the Printer’s Ball Poetry magazine reading. Larry Sawyer started off the reading with game show-like task of having local poets Brandi Homan, Becca Klaver, Mark Tardi, and Michael Robins (filling in for Daniel Borzutsky) choose numbers which were keyed to poems, pre-selected by Sawyer, from the Poetry archives. The unique premise of the reading placed local poets in the potentially awkward yet gratifying position of being the readers of other poets’ works. This layering of poets was most striking when Klaver and Homan read Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” and again when Robins had to read Anne Sexton’s “Sylvia’s Death.” Poets reading other poets’ poems about poets is difficult – perhaps that is why Robins grumbled “no pressure here” when he drew Sexton’s poem in the lottery. It was respect for Sexton that made him reread a stanza to do the poem justice.

Because no one was reading her own work, the room took on the feel of a group of friends discussing an absent, mutual friend with general good humor and an occasional wink. Klaver tackled the verbal gymnastics of reading Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation” while Tardi moved his head in rhythm with the words behind her. When she reached the end of the stanzas with the line “these stanzas are done,” she spoke with genuine relief, and the laughter that followed was not at the expense of the poem, but rather with the enjoyment of having heard its trickiness. Tardi complained he was drawing all the love poems after reading Karen Volkman’s “Casanova in Love” and Ted Berrigan’s “Words of Love” in rapid succession. Homan’s face had the look of greeting an old friend each time she drew a new poem.

The additional benefit of hearing poets read other people’s poems is the instant interpretation, the way they linger over the language. Tardi read three short poems by Edwin Denby with a lightness that danced over the potentially heavy rhymes. Robins read Denise Levertov’s “Life at War” with a quiet deliberateness that allowed any current war parallels to resonate with (not clobber) the listeners.

Other poets read included: Louis Aragon, John Ashbery, Andrei Codrescu, John Tranter, Diane Wakoski, Lewis Warsh (who, we were told by Tardi, “looks like Crispin Glover’s Dad”), and many others whose names got lost in the shuffle.

At the end of the evening, nine unread poems remained on the table next to Robins’ book The Next Settlement, which he plugged delicately. Tardi thanked the nearly thirty listeners, or “perverts of the city” as he called them (alluding to the Lorca poem) for attending. The room was a little stuffy but people lingered to chat and drink wine. Larry was dozing on a bookshelf and I patted him as I made my way down the stairs. I walked out into the evening, but not before buying H. M. Tomlinson’s Out of Soundings, whose leaf-green binding had been calling to me from the one of the nature bookshelves.

Maren Robinson is a reader, writer, dramaturg, and avid bookshelf voyeur. You can check out the 1,170 books (entered to date) from her bookshelves at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Marensr