LIVE AT 851: city lights in kerouac alley
Peter Maravelis hosted Janey Smith‘s Live at 851 reading series in Kerouac Alley as part of City Lights at 60, a six-month-long celebration of the bookstore and publisher’s anniversary, on Sunday, August 4th 2013.
Above are the readers in the following order (with intros by Janey between them):
In that daylight, it felt squeamish as the poets read in a meter that doesn’t always gather the words. It is like they go off the margins when they are reading. They are so tender like mice and so complainant that they forget it is summer.
Sometimes, I think that there is almost nothing wrong in the world but our minds. We get on this articulated course and we forget that everything else is in survival mode, playing it seriously, foraging for food. The bees, for example, keep huddling around the humming bird feeder, or the birds come and steal the sunflowers, but it is still so beautiful.
I forget that without all this culture and society, we might truly be alone having to grow food rather than to simply get up and go down and get it.
I liked it best when Andrea Kneeland spoke frankly about cum in her eyes. I didn’t know it might hurt her, but she was calm, not curled up in her language. I liked how she praised Ben Mirov for his work. Still, you are not supposed to apologize. After all, you are supposed to be giving something, if not, then why bother?
Why are poets apologizing? If you aren’t ready and practiced then why waste our time? I feel that in the reticence there is some truth to it. We should be ashamed of ourselves and the light brings that out.
We have to write things that have no summer or fall. We have to stop complaining. Life is a ball.
We’ve become so spoiled that every temperature change is an excuse to whine. Don’t we see anymore? Can’t we see ourselves?