Do any of you actually like going to readings? When I was a freshman at NYU, I took a train uptown to hear John Ashbery read at Books & Co. on Madison Avenue. It was 1978. The place was packed. I couldn’t see or hear him but it was one of the best nights of my life. The exhilaration of maneuvering the city on my own, the famous store lined with portraits of writers and packed with people dressed in all black. Just being in the presence of one of my favorite poets — who I had discovered on my own — was fantastic.
I went to tons of poetry readings back then. I was hungrier for the anecdotes and asides that the poets told between poems more than for the actual poems. I loved listening to the way they pronounced words, took breaths, etc. I even loved watching a poet take a sip of water. Some would announce that they were going to take a drink. And we would nervously watch them, hoping they wouldn’t spill. Some trembled as they sipped. Others looked as if they were drinking the blood of Christ.
Then there are all those awkward moments poets have to navigate, especially if people start to clap after a poem and whether that sets a clapping precendent for clapping after every poem. Bad. I hate it when poets hunt and peck for what they’re going to read. If a rock star stoned out of his gourd can put a playlist together, I think a poet can manage mixing up the ballads with the sonnets. You know what else I hate about poetry readings? It’s when the poet delivers what I call as soft line and some people in the audience have mini-orgasms. You know what I’m talking about. When they let out a deep mmmmmm. Or some semi-swallowing sound in the back of their throat acknowledging for all of us to hear that they got it. I really fuckin’ hate that. Good, you came. Keep it to yourself.
Tell me about the worst reading you ever went to. Please.
Betsy Lerner 
My own. No one showed up . . .
Betsy, once again your blog has trumped all other entertainment in our house. I’m wiping tears of laughter from my eyes.
I’ve definitely enjoyed most of the readings I’ve attended. They’ve mostly all been at Powell’s in Portland or at Tin House. Here are the people who I really liked, people who really know how to tell stories that might have nothing to do with the current book they’re selling.
– Chuck Klosterman
– Dan Savage
– Aimee Bender
– Tobias Wolfe
– Augusten Burroughs
– Lori Moore
– Ron Carlson
– Nick Flynn
Many others.
Wolff. Not Wolfe.
The worst ever was Rod McKuen. My aunt’s car was broken. She had two tickets. I drew the short straw.
Remember Phil Hartman’s le petit mort in that SNL sketch where Dana Carvey is singing “Choppin’ Broccoli”? Imagine a roomful of people doing that.
Now imagine it’s 23 degrees outside, and your car heater takes 15 minutes to get going. Life is about choices, isn’t it?
I’m afraid I’m probably one of those enthusiastic audience participants who let out deep sighs of approval,much to your annoyance, Betsy.
I can’t help it. I like to sit in the front row; it helps my hearing. Once I am up front the rest of the audience behind me disappears and I develop this delicious fantasy that it’s between me and the speaker alone. Everyone else fades into non existence.
I exaggerate somewhat of course but my children have told me off for clapping too loudly and for generally being too enthusiastic at public gatherings.
Fortunately I don’t go to many poetry and book readings and certainly not in your neck of the woods, so we shouldn’t come to grief together.
The next time I let out a loud sigh of approval at a talk I’ll think of you and duck.
Drunk; fell off the stage. Maybe that was the best?
I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to think of the worst, but many are just mediocre, especially the ones that try to sound oh so literary. Kate Braverman was very late for hers and definitely high on something, so that one stands out in my memory (but it was a really good reading); and Christopher Bram’s at The Strand was pretty good not too long ago.
I went to a reading and the writer read her good Amazon reviews to the audience, and then told a joke that I heard Joan Rivers tell in 1970. People laughed. I hate the suburbs.
Sometimes I hate writers.
Readings (like most events that involve putting on underpants and leaving my house) always seem like such a good idea when I make the plan, weeks in advance, but usually turn out to be painful and disappointing. Although you could swap “readings” with “parties” or “group dinners” or any almost any other variety of social interaction and I’d feel the same way.
Notable exceptions to painful/disappointing outcome: Mary Karr, Jamaica Kincaid, Haven Kimmel, Augusten Burroughs and Taylor Negron, who had a piano player and a violinist, which was spectacular. Slightly off-topic: I think all readings should be structured to be more entertaining, e.g. with music and multiple acts. And snacks. There should always be snacks.
An author who shall remain nameless (mostly cause I’ve forgotten it) spent the first ten minutes of his reading excoriating the review that ran in the local paper that day. He literally took issue with every sentence. More than 100 people attended the reading. No one bought a book.
Sometimes I love authors.
margaret atwood reads like a robot and could give two shits about her audience/readers/people in general. it’s kind of frightening, really.
What a relief. I don’t feel so bad now for snoozing while half-drunk in my Women In Literature class that took place in the evenings just around the corner from a bunch of bars that put out great free food for happy hour. We were reading The Handmaid’s Tale.
i’m canadian and margaret atwood is crammed down our throats. here’s a funny story written by Mark Jarman: http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/QWERTY/Qweb/qwerte/jarman/love.html
I just read the story on Atwood. Very funny until I got to the last half where perhaps being Canadian would be more helpful. Nice read nonetheless. Thanks.
Snacks! that’s it! what kind of snacks go with what book?
Hearing Carolyn Forche read in Tulsa changed my life. For real. I moved, left my lover, changed careers.
1) Performing with the all-chick poetry quintet THE PUSSY POETS (deep sigh of personal forgiveness for having once been in my 20’s in the 90’s) at Fez Under Time Cafe, I didn’t realize that the back two legs of my chair had gotten hooked to the back lip of the stage. When I sat down in the chair, it tipped backwards and I went ass-over-tincups off the stage, legs in the air, bug on my back. I needed a Pussy Poet on each side to grab my forearms and haul me upright. (Don’t we all.)
2) Bad news: Allen Ginsberg dies. Good news: big reading of his works at some big nightclub club on the West Side, name escapes me 12 years later. Good news: at the last minute, the organizer approaches me. Would I be willing to join the celebrated roster of readers and read one of Mr. Ginsberg’s poems? Are you kidding? Fuck yeah. Good news: I get up to read, the title is unfamiliar, I jump in, my heart full of sorrow and joy in equal measure, the place is packed. Bad news: The poem is a wildly explicit celebration of a gay sexual romp, complete with anal penetration and bellowing, orgasmic delight. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but let’s just say not my subject matter. Good news: I just go with it, Goddammit, and give the reading my all. It’s the least I could do for Mr. Ginsberg.
Hilarious. Nice story.
Jim Carroll pulled that “I’m kinda out of it, not really trying to be impressive and too cool to be too into it where oh where is the poem I was going to read” thing each and every time I ever saw him read, pawing through his things like little boy lost after, of course, he showed up anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or more late.
I agree. It’s bullshit. We all know you’re famous for being an outrageous junkie and rock flash in the pan, you don’t have to prove it and play the part to burlesque, so If you show up, show up to honor the craft and for crying out loud the audience.
Sure, I’ve got many more nightmare readings to detail, a woman who put on antlers to read her “Deer Healer Woman” or some such thing in a sorry San Francisco cafe comes to mind, and I’ve got a thousand others, but Caroll was a real writer and he always stooped to this jive, and also overused junk and pop references to elicit those very twee titters from the suburban jive turkey crowds like a duck hunter with a military rifle scope.
Ugh. For such a thrilling and timeless art, poetry has sunk to unimaginable lows. Ashbery was like watching paint dry last time I saw him.
Talk about a truly dead art. Then again, very few arts are left alive now.
Only the laughing bones remain.
Arthur Golden reading MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA at the Miami Book Fair years ago. Every time he read female dialogue, he faked a “girly” voice. And it made me stifle a giggle. Every time.
Have you read this: Scenes From the World’s Most Annoying Poetry Reading:
http://jezebel.com/5420855/let-the-laughers-stand-up-scenes-from-the-worlds-most-annoying-poetry-reading
It’s pretty bad.
I was excited when Jamaica Kincaid came to speak at Northwestern (I live across the street). She was to deliver the annual Leon Forrest Lecture and to speak “On Writing.” Instead, she read (quietly) excerpts from her writing for an hour and 20 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for questions.
She answered every question about writing with some version of the fact that she knew she was brilliant by age 3, and that if you aren’t brilliant, you will never be a writer. She does not have a process, she is merely brilliant. And other writers (slackers like Wordsworth) were not really brilliant, just over exposed. It was boring and disheartening.
Why users still use to read news papers when in this technological
globe all is existing on net?