reading last nite

So last night I went to the Dennis Cooley and Fred Wah reading at Campion College. There were about 20ish people in attendance, mostly younger folk/university students and some profs. I'd never seen either of the poets read before so I wasn't sure what to expect.

Fred Wah read first and he had a television set up to display images. A lot of his poems respond to photography, which is something I am very interested in. He had taken some of the photos himself, but others were in collaboration with other artists. I especially liked the long lines of some of Wah's panoramic poems, the interaction between language and image, and the personas that he adopted in certain poems. His Is a Door poems were especially playful and hypnotic to listen to, and the photographs of broken doors really worked well.

Dennis Cooley read next, from various books. Similar to Wah, many of his poems adopted a persona. It was great to see them live. Cooley seemed somewhat disappointed in the audiences quietness. We did not laugh at the right moments and he really seemed to emphasize the humour in his poems. In his persona poems he simply spoke through these characters' voices, in their own words, and did not commentate or otherwise frame their experiences. Sometimes I have issues with character poems that are written from a third-person perspective that almost seem to judge the character as an object and are not self-conscious about this lens of viewing the "other." Cooley's poems totally avoided this, I think. He also had a lot of found poems which were taken from various sources.

I talked to Dennis Cooley afterwards so he could sign a book for my dad.. he said he's written some mock anglo saxon verse so I'll have to check it out!

There should be more readings like this in Regina! Talking fresh was so amazing and I try to go to the vertigo when I can.. maybe I'm just getting greedy.