{poetry envy}

Allison Benis, you have destroyed me!

so on a poetry bender last night, I went to Beyond Baroque (a fantastic literary center in Venice) for an open mic and featured reader thing, before going into Santa Monica for Co-Lab, an amazing open mic where no one is allowed to perform alone and poets collaborate with musicians including violinists, a beatboxer, a harpist, a DJ, and so on.

anyway, I didn't know anyone at the BB reading, so I was strangely nervous -- I forget sometimes what it's like to enter a space where I know no one and nobody knows me. it's a valuable reminder for those of us who run spaces, and have been doing this for what feels like forever. how much it means to have a stranger make a connection.

in any case, the open mic people were fine, above-par for your average open mic, actually. the first feature is moving to NYC in the fall to get his MFA at NYU, so I gave him a flyer for 13.

the second feature was Allison Benis. she explained that she was going to read nine prose poems from her manuscript, which consists entirely of poems dealing with absence through the lens of Degas' paintings, sculpture, and sketches. I was worried. it didn't bode well. too many layers, I thought.

I was wrong. it's happened before. it'll happen again.

look at this:


From Degas' Sketchbook
by Allison Benis

The hidden are alone too. I crouched in the closet, between my mother’s skirts and shoes, where the legs should be. Whether I was quiet or not, I would be found. It was an obvious place. Her clothes and shoes. I only have to say it once. I don’t say anything because the game requires silence. This is an external narrative: when I was small. It would be easier to fold in half or not say anything. People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon. I will tell you something quietly: we tried to send her a birthday card, but it was returned, wrong address. It is common to know very little, if anything. The point is to stay calm. To be found before you disappear. Not blank or colored in yet, but the outline of upturned hands and a quick circle for a mouth. Sometimes the face is so specific and the body is just penciled lightly in. It would be easier to finish here, before the tenderness of the figure is gone. And the silk of the slip sewn inside my skirt as I sat carefully in the dark. It is so close to being skin. People exist for as long as possible until it is too difficult to matter. The shoulders are the span of the hanger and the mind is the hook which suspends the entire dress.

***

are you kidding me? I am completely wrecked. "People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon." the way she's able to weave the ordinary into this terrifying strangeness -- "The point is to stay calm. To be found before you disappear."

in several of the other poems (you can find her work on the Poets & Writers web site) she accomplishes even more than in this one to leap from idea to idea and never lose us, never feel arbitrary.

I read "the impossibility of February" which is madness enough to thrill the academics and I've worked out the performance enough for everyone else so it's my fallback poem in most unfamiliar settings.

and I really wanted Allison Benis to like me.

here's another one of her poems:

Waiting
by Allison Benis

I think of broken snow, but this is permanent. Two separate women on a bench—crossed at the wrists, her hands could make a smaller version of the dancer unlacing her shoes. Or maybe she's just clutching her ankle in order to communicate a small, but consistent pain. The kind that makes you look at pictures because words are not sufficient to describe it.

God said just float on a black lake like a child floats on her back to stare at stars. Let go. Watch cool paper boats. But I'm afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin). When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again.

When I hear her set her coffee back on the counter, I look at my napkin to pretend I'm occupied with my love of circles. This could be an aerial sketch of twirling ballerinas, I think—each dancer ignoring the small white pain in her ankle. Like a moon incessantly reflected in a lake. When a child floats on a paper boat, she wonders, Where do stones go after they've pleased God?

This is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don’t know how to draw the fear of separation. We were alone for a long time. After many years, God said to the child, There are hundreds of wet stones in your mouth--and inside stone, the possibility of black unopened umbrellas.

***

I think I'm not trying hard enough. I'm not pushing my hands far enough into the dark. did she find her way there through Degas, or were the images always there and it is only in this series that she uses him? did examining her life through the lens of his work complicate it or simplify it? now I'm obsessing.

perhaps I will write a series of poems about living alone in California through the lens of a grapefruit. sigh.