2009 24-Hour setlist - Part 2
Hour 21 - 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Stanley Kunitz - Revolving Meditation
Stanley Kunitz - A Spark of Laurel
Stanley Kunitz - The Gladiators
Stanley Kunitz - The Mulch
Stanley Kunitz - Cleopatra
Stanley Kunitz - Dante
Stanley Kunitz - The Artist
Stanley Kunitz - The Crystal Cage
Stanley Kunitz - My Sisters
Stanley Kunitz - The Layers
Stanley Kunitz - The Snakes of September
Stanley Kunitz - The Abduction
Stanley Kunitz - The Old Darned Man
Stanley Kunitz - The Image-Maker
Stanley Kunitz - Three Small Parables For My Poet Friends
Stanley Kunitz - Passing Through
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Little Heard True Stories About Benjamin Franklin
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Hog Butcher of the Workshop Table
Poems: 18
Hour 22 - 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Ishmael Reed - The Katskills Kiss Romance Goodbye
Ishmael Reed - Crocodiles
Ishmael Reed - Visit to a Small College
Ishmael Reed - The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday
Ishmael Reed - Jacket Notes
Ishmael Reed - Poem Delivered before Assembly of Colored People…
Ishmael Reed - Sather Tower Mystery
Ishmael Reed - Foolology
Ishmael Reed - The Reactionary Poet
Ishmael Reed - Petite Kid Everett
Ishmael Reed - Turning Pro
Ishmael Reed - The Pope Replies to the Ayatollah Khomeini
Ishmael Reed - Judas
Ishmael Reed - Poem for Two Daughters
Ishmael Reed - Martine’s Keen Eyes
Ishmael Reed - But Nobody Was There
Ishmael Reed - Slaveship, German Model
Ishmael Reed - Memphis
Ishmael Reed - Love Crime
Ishmael Reed - Inspiration Point, Berkeley
Ishmael Reed - Notes on Virginia
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - At Night On Tour
Poems: 22
Hour 23 - 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
W.D. Snodgrass - Home Town
W.D. Snodgrass - The Mouse
W.D. Snodgrass - Viewing the Body
W.D. Snodgrass - The Survivors
W.D. Snodgrass - Lobsters in the Window
W.D. Snodgrass - Looking
W.D. Snodgrass - A Friend
W.D. Snodgrass - The Lovers Go Fly a Kite
W.D. Snodgrass - Flash Flood
W.D. Snodgrass - “After Experience Taught me…”
W.D. Snodgrass - Matisse: “The Red Studio”
W.D. Snodgrass - Setting Out
W.D. Snodgrass - A Locked House
W.D. Snodgrass - A Seashell
W.D. Snodgrass - The Poet Ridiculed by Hysterical Academics
W.D. Snodgrass - The house the Poet Built
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Taft
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - If My Mom Had Known About Nebraska
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Warranty
Poems: 19
Hour 24 - 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
(All original work)
Scott Woods - The Saint of Lines That Should Not Be Crossed
Scott Woods - Paincakes
Scott Woods - Lamborghini Hickies (Chris Brown)
Scott Woods/Bill Campana - Make Love To My Mind
Scott Woods - Bob Ross Loves You Baby
Scott Woods - Spock With A Beard
Scott Woods - A Snowy Day
Scott Woods - Alexandre Dumas
Scott Woods - Amazing
Scott Woods - The Bible in 50 Haikus
Scott Woods - Things Made Sexy By Adding the Phrase “In Your Pants”
Poems: 11
TOTAL # OF POEMS = 374
And some notes:
1.
For the record, it takes 16 hours to recite the unabridged Illiad. It takes about 13 hours to do the Odyssey. I won’t tell you the story that necessitated me digging that information up, but I think that’s interesting information for a poet to have.
2.
I didn’t record the show this year. Instead, I changed my record-keeping system to a simple method of Post-It placement. Anytime I read a poem, I slipped a Post-It to the bottom of its page. When I read a Cristin poem that hour, I simply put the copy of her poem in the book of the dedicated poet. When it was a poem of hers from the book, I put a Post-It on the page and wrote which hour I read it in. I lose the exact order from each hour this way, but really; who cares what order I read them in at this point? You? How about you, you care? Right, I didn’t so. I did try to keep it close to exact for my hours though.
3.
Some thanks:
- Dave & Louise tag-team babysitting so that there would be a broadcast. That’s serious, and thank you. As I understand it (because he didn’t thump his chest about it) Dave bought a camera to do this, and it worked out awesome.
- Beverly and the crocheting…not knitting, son! She now has a 24-hour blanket that’s not only cute, but big. You’d be surprised how much you can do if you seriously and completely dedicated 24 hours straight of your life to something. Go ahead: try it.
- Teri (and Ed, maybe?) had that stage and room set-up by the time I hit the door. It was so rock star. I moved a chair about an inch just to feel like I was doing something. Thank you!
4.
Drop-in student to me during the break after the Bukowski hour: I thought, “This guy’s pretty good, but he’s trying to sound like Bukowski.”
5.
Some things that work on the page just don’t fly on the stage.
Picking long poems, I thought, “That will eat up time AND give people a good look at their style. But when it came time to consider it, I almost read no one’s long work. It just didn’t lend itself to a good show. No one comes out to be punished with words.
Some things on the page work better on the page because of how they look.
Stafford’s “New Letters from Thomas Jefferson” is one of those.
I sometimes treat them like jazz. Once in a while - rarely - I’ll take a liberty with someone’s poem and say something instead of something else, or drop it. Usually something foreign or hard to say.
Snodgrass is the only poet I know for sure who performed their poems better than I performed their poems. Some of them I know were dry and some I have never heard or seen read publicly, so I don’t know. But I KNOW I don’t want to ever have had to slam against Snodgrass. His work may not look like it on the page, but to hear him do it? Step back.
6.
Biggest shock poet for some audience: Elizabeth Alexander. It was funny to hear from people how different her work in general is to the inauguration poem. I kept saying: Alexander is the bomb. Told you so.
7.
Really, Cristin is the biggest shock poet.
Without any question, leaving no room for doubt, outside of my own work, Cristin O’keefe Aptowicz’s stuff had people in tears with laughter. She is the funniest poet of her depth and output that I know. Considering I read from only one of her books and the 30+ pages (!) of stuff she emailed me before the show isn’t in any of her previous books…well, that’s more than impressive. It means she’s a knock-you-on-your-butt-funny automaton. I’m not just saying that because I really like poets who don’t walk around acting like they’re god’s gift to poetry because they have a strong 20-minute feature of six poems that are ten years old. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is better than you. Yes, you. I’d be reading someone’s poem, then say, “I’ll do a couple of Cristin’s poems now to get us to the break” and people would go “yay!”
Cristin: get your ass here for a feature NOW. You’ll sell every book you got.
8.
I enjoyed taking the time to explain what some of the poems were doing, or how a poet’s body of work I was about to read was going to utilize some tool or theme. I felt like a real teacher in those moments.
9.
Kevin Young will go down as an important voice in modern poetry, and especially black poetry. He will do so because of many thick books of good poems. That said, I had a LOT of Young’s stuff picked out to read, but ended up focusing almost entirely on his odes to food. They were great to hear out loud and people were eating them up. (Rimshot.)
10.
My god, the words! The hard words! The freaking foreign words! The words so infrequently used that they seem foreign! Some of them I just had to guess at. Some of them you aren’t sure about because no one ever uses those words in conversation. Some of them make perfect sense on the page, but when it comes time to say them, they swim away.
11.
There is really no way to adequately prepare to read twenty-four hours of poetry. You can’t rehearse hundreds of poems in anticipation of it and expect to still have a voice (I sound like a sick Barry White now). You have to go into it with a heaping spoonful of faith and hope that the poetry you like in a book will translate live. Most of the time it does, but sometimes it doesn’t: Ishmael Reed is a lot more fun to read than he is to recite or hear. So is Philip Levine. So is Stanley Kunitz. I could tell how successful their hours were based on how many of Cristin’s poems were shoved into their books when I put them down.
12.
I think Anne Marie would have loved it. I bet good money she’d have sat through all twenty-four hours, too. This one’s for you, sis!
13.
Looking out on that crowd during the last hour and seeing all these people I love was so gratifying. Thank you all for coming. It really is like Poetry Thanksgiving!
14.
Thank you, poets. Without your work, this don't happen.
.
Stanley Kunitz - Revolving Meditation
Stanley Kunitz - A Spark of Laurel
Stanley Kunitz - The Gladiators
Stanley Kunitz - The Mulch
Stanley Kunitz - Cleopatra
Stanley Kunitz - Dante
Stanley Kunitz - The Artist
Stanley Kunitz - The Crystal Cage
Stanley Kunitz - My Sisters
Stanley Kunitz - The Layers
Stanley Kunitz - The Snakes of September
Stanley Kunitz - The Abduction
Stanley Kunitz - The Old Darned Man
Stanley Kunitz - The Image-Maker
Stanley Kunitz - Three Small Parables For My Poet Friends
Stanley Kunitz - Passing Through
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Little Heard True Stories About Benjamin Franklin
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Hog Butcher of the Workshop Table
Poems: 18
Hour 22 - 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Ishmael Reed - The Katskills Kiss Romance Goodbye
Ishmael Reed - Crocodiles
Ishmael Reed - Visit to a Small College
Ishmael Reed - The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday
Ishmael Reed - Jacket Notes
Ishmael Reed - Poem Delivered before Assembly of Colored People…
Ishmael Reed - Sather Tower Mystery
Ishmael Reed - Foolology
Ishmael Reed - The Reactionary Poet
Ishmael Reed - Petite Kid Everett
Ishmael Reed - Turning Pro
Ishmael Reed - The Pope Replies to the Ayatollah Khomeini
Ishmael Reed - Judas
Ishmael Reed - Poem for Two Daughters
Ishmael Reed - Martine’s Keen Eyes
Ishmael Reed - But Nobody Was There
Ishmael Reed - Slaveship, German Model
Ishmael Reed - Memphis
Ishmael Reed - Love Crime
Ishmael Reed - Inspiration Point, Berkeley
Ishmael Reed - Notes on Virginia
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - At Night On Tour
Poems: 22
Hour 23 - 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
W.D. Snodgrass - Home Town
W.D. Snodgrass - The Mouse
W.D. Snodgrass - Viewing the Body
W.D. Snodgrass - The Survivors
W.D. Snodgrass - Lobsters in the Window
W.D. Snodgrass - Looking
W.D. Snodgrass - A Friend
W.D. Snodgrass - The Lovers Go Fly a Kite
W.D. Snodgrass - Flash Flood
W.D. Snodgrass - “After Experience Taught me…”
W.D. Snodgrass - Matisse: “The Red Studio”
W.D. Snodgrass - Setting Out
W.D. Snodgrass - A Locked House
W.D. Snodgrass - A Seashell
W.D. Snodgrass - The Poet Ridiculed by Hysterical Academics
W.D. Snodgrass - The house the Poet Built
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Taft
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - If My Mom Had Known About Nebraska
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz - Warranty
Poems: 19
Hour 24 - 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
(All original work)
Scott Woods - The Saint of Lines That Should Not Be Crossed
Scott Woods - Paincakes
Scott Woods - Lamborghini Hickies (Chris Brown)
Scott Woods/Bill Campana - Make Love To My Mind
Scott Woods - Bob Ross Loves You Baby
Scott Woods - Spock With A Beard
Scott Woods - A Snowy Day
Scott Woods - Alexandre Dumas
Scott Woods - Amazing
Scott Woods - The Bible in 50 Haikus
Scott Woods - Things Made Sexy By Adding the Phrase “In Your Pants”
Poems: 11
TOTAL # OF POEMS = 374
And some notes:
1.
For the record, it takes 16 hours to recite the unabridged Illiad. It takes about 13 hours to do the Odyssey. I won’t tell you the story that necessitated me digging that information up, but I think that’s interesting information for a poet to have.
2.
I didn’t record the show this year. Instead, I changed my record-keeping system to a simple method of Post-It placement. Anytime I read a poem, I slipped a Post-It to the bottom of its page. When I read a Cristin poem that hour, I simply put the copy of her poem in the book of the dedicated poet. When it was a poem of hers from the book, I put a Post-It on the page and wrote which hour I read it in. I lose the exact order from each hour this way, but really; who cares what order I read them in at this point? You? How about you, you care? Right, I didn’t so. I did try to keep it close to exact for my hours though.
3.
Some thanks:
- Dave & Louise tag-team babysitting so that there would be a broadcast. That’s serious, and thank you. As I understand it (because he didn’t thump his chest about it) Dave bought a camera to do this, and it worked out awesome.
- Beverly and the crocheting…not knitting, son! She now has a 24-hour blanket that’s not only cute, but big. You’d be surprised how much you can do if you seriously and completely dedicated 24 hours straight of your life to something. Go ahead: try it.
- Teri (and Ed, maybe?) had that stage and room set-up by the time I hit the door. It was so rock star. I moved a chair about an inch just to feel like I was doing something. Thank you!
4.
Drop-in student to me during the break after the Bukowski hour: I thought, “This guy’s pretty good, but he’s trying to sound like Bukowski.”
5.
Some things that work on the page just don’t fly on the stage.
Picking long poems, I thought, “That will eat up time AND give people a good look at their style. But when it came time to consider it, I almost read no one’s long work. It just didn’t lend itself to a good show. No one comes out to be punished with words.
Some things on the page work better on the page because of how they look.
Stafford’s “New Letters from Thomas Jefferson” is one of those.
I sometimes treat them like jazz. Once in a while - rarely - I’ll take a liberty with someone’s poem and say something instead of something else, or drop it. Usually something foreign or hard to say.
Snodgrass is the only poet I know for sure who performed their poems better than I performed their poems. Some of them I know were dry and some I have never heard or seen read publicly, so I don’t know. But I KNOW I don’t want to ever have had to slam against Snodgrass. His work may not look like it on the page, but to hear him do it? Step back.
6.
Biggest shock poet for some audience: Elizabeth Alexander. It was funny to hear from people how different her work in general is to the inauguration poem. I kept saying: Alexander is the bomb. Told you so.
7.
Really, Cristin is the biggest shock poet.
Without any question, leaving no room for doubt, outside of my own work, Cristin O’keefe Aptowicz’s stuff had people in tears with laughter. She is the funniest poet of her depth and output that I know. Considering I read from only one of her books and the 30+ pages (!) of stuff she emailed me before the show isn’t in any of her previous books…well, that’s more than impressive. It means she’s a knock-you-on-your-butt-funny automaton. I’m not just saying that because I really like poets who don’t walk around acting like they’re god’s gift to poetry because they have a strong 20-minute feature of six poems that are ten years old. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is better than you. Yes, you. I’d be reading someone’s poem, then say, “I’ll do a couple of Cristin’s poems now to get us to the break” and people would go “yay!”
Cristin: get your ass here for a feature NOW. You’ll sell every book you got.
8.
I enjoyed taking the time to explain what some of the poems were doing, or how a poet’s body of work I was about to read was going to utilize some tool or theme. I felt like a real teacher in those moments.
9.
Kevin Young will go down as an important voice in modern poetry, and especially black poetry. He will do so because of many thick books of good poems. That said, I had a LOT of Young’s stuff picked out to read, but ended up focusing almost entirely on his odes to food. They were great to hear out loud and people were eating them up. (Rimshot.)
10.
My god, the words! The hard words! The freaking foreign words! The words so infrequently used that they seem foreign! Some of them I just had to guess at. Some of them you aren’t sure about because no one ever uses those words in conversation. Some of them make perfect sense on the page, but when it comes time to say them, they swim away.
11.
There is really no way to adequately prepare to read twenty-four hours of poetry. You can’t rehearse hundreds of poems in anticipation of it and expect to still have a voice (I sound like a sick Barry White now). You have to go into it with a heaping spoonful of faith and hope that the poetry you like in a book will translate live. Most of the time it does, but sometimes it doesn’t: Ishmael Reed is a lot more fun to read than he is to recite or hear. So is Philip Levine. So is Stanley Kunitz. I could tell how successful their hours were based on how many of Cristin’s poems were shoved into their books when I put them down.
12.
I think Anne Marie would have loved it. I bet good money she’d have sat through all twenty-four hours, too. This one’s for you, sis!
13.
Looking out on that crowd during the last hour and seeing all these people I love was so gratifying. Thank you all for coming. It really is like Poetry Thanksgiving!
14.
Thank you, poets. Without your work, this don't happen.
.