reading report: marinovich/coolidge

SUCH a great double bill at the poetry project last night.  I had never seen Filip Marinovich read before and he was great!  So great!  He was wearing, for no explained reason, a navy blue bathrobe.  Beyond just reading his poems, which were marvellously expressionistic, almost Mayakovsky-esque, he DECLAIMED them.  They were full of political satire, faux-serious and serious-faux references to mythology, daring hyperbole, and beatific lyric force.  He opened the reading by holding up what he called a poème concrete, a t-shirt with two crossing words (COOLIDGE ROCKS), and ended with a gorgeous poem for Akilah Oliver. Some choice lines:

service without bile

service with satori

lungs turning gelatinous and coated with disco ball mosaic

summoned the spoogey bird

I am only a bowl of milk in your shade, lapped at by snow cats, salty, salty

there is no anti-matter bird laying a black hole in your blood

O Nancy Pelosi I miss you come back!

I am not a fairy

not not a fairy

and I love my lady

investigative milky cartoons

the Bach violin monster

tearing your ears apart

Clark Coolidge is simply the most sublime of all living poets.  I want to have his voice reading his poetry piped into my head 24/7. It’s a flow of impeccably syncopated constant astonishment, and it’s super-funny, even he was laughing at his own lines, and I love that, his delight so palpable, why can’t more writers take delight like that in what they do.  Streams of names, abstract expressionist painter names, other names, as music, and rhyming couplets popping up here and there.  I caught a few of the minnows in the stream:

we had a date to watch the rabbis fight

I wish childhood hadn’t been so fissionable

a nautilus in a sheepshank vest

turn the crank one day and the entirety of Amos ‘n’ Andy comes out

You start again with every noodle

hit the nebula with a stick

An incoorect music clouds the air

back when I thought the best breasts came in cones

zombie opens umbrella

still no meat

poet writes an ode to a piece of kelp

this poet is no help

music’s a kind of crystal mayonnaise

are you acquainted with the VOICE family?

all forest rose up from the original bean

a promise like a silk cosmos

corn is not my friend

glass isn’t either

next he visits a pimple, I mean a kitchen

he needs to go, so he develops zebra legs

maybe he needs a quick infusion of lore

amazing how many husbands there are in the world –

tugboats, too