"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." -Oscar Wilde

Perhaps it was the longstanding SouthCoast tradition of miscomprehending the role of the artist in society, but I have always understood writing as a solitary craft.
I was never the type to join writers' groups, so I was fortunate to high school on an autarchic little island of Jesuit erudition. In Fall River, the intellectual backwater where the academy was situated, creative writing is considered a profligate luxury and associated with the lavender silk pillow set.
Elsewhere -- let's say, oh, Newport -- one's pals were perpetually dipping their quills into the community-fostered inkpot and scratching invisible keepsakes into some packsack or other; it's hard to not wring the sighs and cries and forge them into some attempt at beautiful music. I was afforded plenty of opportunities to share my poetry publicly. Which panned out quite well, with a few local literary publications printing a few pieces at no cost to me.
And once, I was actually compensated for it.
In free copies of the magazine.
(The magazine, incidentally, was printed for free by some sucker and offered at artsy establishments without charge.)
But that was last century, when the idea of reading poetry aloud before an audience was an exercise for greybeards to practice before bluehairs.
I practiced my own penchant for performance on professional and amateur proscenia. I could see no reason to muddy the literary waters by conjoining poetry and drama (*coff*Shakespeare*coff), but seeing as how entropy was firmly mucking up every other definition that I had ever learned, "performance art" became the obscenely ubiquitous medium of expression for poetry.
Or what passed, in some quarters, for it.
You may remember the shorthand sitcom stereotype of "poetry reading." Black turtlenecked clove cigarette smokers snapping their fingers at self-impressed berks who think that "melancholy" coordinates metrically with "broken doll" if you frown hard enough. You know the bit.But at poetry slams, similar clichés assaulted.
Poetry slams brought movement and instruments and percussion and recordings into the coffeehouse. Young people (and, dude, twenty-five years ago, I was one) were treated to Schoolhouse Rock versions of Horatian odes -- well, without the Augustan principles and with more pauses and swear words.
At some point in the evolution of the form, merely reading a poem, without mixed media presentations and throbbing basslines, was considered boring. Stuffy. And, um, not really poetry at all.
Since I was playing the museum and library circuit -- where bookish unrhymed iambs of maritime irony played better -- I would not have minded even the evolution of reading events into hip-hop franchises.
If it weren't for some humorless, witless, and charmless participants.
"Irony," as it turns out, requires lots of those sneaky meaning-filled "words," and usually not ones that served in coarser contexts as substitutes for "genitalia."
There was the woman who screamed obscenities while ripping up family photographs. There was the couple who shouted inanities and then full-bodyslammed each other. There were the ones who gave heft to bland words like "stupid" by inserting painfully uncomfortable silences before, during, and after. The ones who would fall to the stage and say, "CRASH!" The ones who spoke in a soft whisper except for the times when they hollered.
I found some of them to be fierce, earnest, mean-spirited, frightened, impolite, unpolished, tattooed, angry, blathering prats who were unaware that the novelty had worn out decades before. I was not familiar with their vocabulary and my more-often technical observations were generally ignored because concerns like metaphor and comprehensibility were oldhat distractions. Because I was neither relentlessly self-absorbed nor sickeningly fawning.
I had a college "advisor" who found fly-fishing not only diverting but uncommon enough to appear hip, and extolled the virtues of freshwater angling while tying lures during our advisory sessions. Turns out that he did this so that when his wife called, he could say that he was tying nymphs in his office. Which he found exceedingly clever. He spent long hours attempting to parse the poetry of Bob Dylan's popular songs, claiming that Dylan was the only songwriter whose work stood up to classical literary analysis. While twisting waxed thread around the shank of a hook, he twisted himself in excogitating convolutions in order to prove Zimmerman's lyrical acumen. I handed him the lyricsheet from Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom.
That's around the time when a new faculty advisor showed up with a bottle of Dewar's and a syllabus filled with Eugene O'Neill.
A poem is not a song. When the words of a song can be effective without performance -- when appreciated first-hand from the page and not blared from a stage -- that is where poetry lives for me. I have been moved by some fine and new poets. Locally, I know of many. They are hard to find, unless you know where to pick up their chapbooks, which says less about the poets' public relations skills than it does about the public's relationship with poets.
But this intrigues me:

NORTH DARTMOUTH, Massachusetts (May 4, 2011) – Baker Books and WhalingCity Review are thrilled to welcome Janet E. Aalfs to the bookstore’s Bean & Leaf Café for a poetry reading on Saturday, May 21st at 7:00PM. Aalfs, who was the poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts(2003-2005), weaves poetry and martial arts dance in performing,teaching, and social justice activism locally, nationally and internationally.

"Intrigues me," much more than this:
Because I would rather extrapolate on the meanings of words and their order. Rather than concentrate on the personality or the performer.

O My Lily of Killarney

I have only ever heard two people in Rhode Island utter the name of the last Hawaiian queen, and they both pronounced that name dramatically differently.
The first -- a Fifth Grade teacher who had our class memorize the locations of Union and Confederate losses as well as the names of the hapless generals whose incompetence he held as cause -- intoned the designation as some variation of "Lily O'Killarney."
The only other person who ever said the name was the breathtaking Sophronia (mentioned here and here) who, while recently visiting her alma mater Brown University and avoiding Emma Watson, exhaled the name of "Leeliwokeelahnay" incidentally, carelessly, and as though she were referring to her mother's great-aunt.
Which she probably was.
And that's what I got for mentioning Sarah Vowell's newest book and that it's about Hawaii.
As I steamed through Unfamiliar Fishes -- Sarah Vowell's gift to us dockbound vicarious history vacationers -- it was the latter's voice that I heard wrestling control from the unmistakably characteristic Sarah Vowell. Whenever I read a rumination of historical events ruminated upon by Sarah Vowell, I invariably hear the veritable voice of Sarah Vowell reading it. And this without the audiobook version.

Blame it on my decades of blade-and-tape audio editing, call screening, or phone center customer servicing, but once I've heard a voice, it's filed in the soggy attaché that I secret behind my eyes. But whenever I see a word that isn't German and possesses numerous neighboring vowels, I can hear Sophronia's luscious mezzo-soprano, casually and fragantly dropping the name of some secluded beach or other on the island where she herself exotically bloomed, moonlight dappling her soft cocoa skin, softly dusted by fine volcanic sand languorously affixed with playful errant splashes of warm salt sea...
You know, like humuhumunukunukuāpua‘a. Or kahlua. Or uhaul.
Although, a weekend running around the former Sandwiches with Sarah Vowell would be a pleasant diversion. She apparently knows everybody and certainly recognizes the best spots for plate lunch. And the bonus is that for every hike to Kealakekua Bay with her precious nephew, we get to hang out in a moldy house museum or library stacks with some ardent and single-minded archivist caricatures.

Although I am sure that we'd argue about whether sugar laborers or American whalers are the root of Hawaiian Portuguese cuisine.
I guess we'd just have to sample lots of it.
Unfamiliar Fishes is a fine sampler of another variety of fare.
One might button down Unfamiliar Fishes as a sequel to The Wordy Shipmates in that once again, Protestant busybodies in their missionary zeal spoil everything. The Wordy Shipmates features spot-on discussions of John "Ronald Reagan Will Misquote Me Often" Winthrop and our local celebrities Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. These folks and their progeny -- divergent though their intentions were -- sank the hooks pretty deep into New England soil. Deep enough so that a new generation of clumsy genocidists feels compelled to exercise itself even further west and further demonstrate what a bunch of greedy clever prissy selfish hypocrites they were.
Unfamiliar Fishes testifies to a historian's vocation: to introduce us to people who can no longer edit themselves or tweak their own reputations. Sarah Vowell lets the participants tell their stories, usually in their own words, and sometimes repetitively. The still-wordy missionaries ("mikaneles"), Bible-literate haoles, ill-prepared maoli -- and their historical and contemporary mouthpieces. At one point, I found myself immersed in an engaging reminiscence of the Nation of Hawaii before it became clear that I had neglected to return to Sarah Vowell's book after briefly consulting Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen on my Kindle. I don't know if Sarah Vowell was channeling Queen Liliuokalani. Recently, I've found that technology sometimes troubles me.
Pre-ordering a new Sarah Vowell book and awaiting the Kindle upload date, I was put in mind of haunting the college pub, anticipating the presence of some sweet object of schoolboy fascination from History of Literature class.
You spend a lot of the night getting up the nerve, but when you do introduce yourself, you immediately fall in with a welcoming and agreeable companion.
You giggle about Andrew Marvell's time-consuming slampiece, sing along with the Neil Young on the jukebox (who THEHELL played that ?), quote The Brady Bunch and that funny NPR show, try the drink that the bartender has "been working on," and nobody exchanges numbers because you'll be in class Wednesday and Friday.
I was mailed a copy of The Wordy Shipmates, and even though I am a self-impressed gasbag recognized widely for "bombastic pomposity" (I can't let go), I never wrote a review. I understand that when someone sends you a book for free before it is even dropped, you probably should do. No such demands were made on me, but I said nice things anyway. In a brief statement about something else.
And then Sarah Vowell comes to New Bedford, sneaks around the Whaling Historical National Scenic Shopping District, and doesn't even have her people send a note to advise me that I have been officially snubbed.
Sarah Vowell has made some impression on the local Visitor's Center volunteer coterie. Just after the publication of her exchange with a decidedly emblematic New Bedfidgian ("Oh No Not Another Moby-Dickhead"), the Cetacean Holocaust National Paving Blocks Aren't Cobblestones Dammit Park people are actively seeking new volunteers who will gush about Melville's big ole book.
I am sure, however, that the New Bedford Office of Who's In Charge of Tourism This Week appreciates Sarah Vowell's strict observance of the "You can't say 'New Bedford' without saying 'Whaling Museum'" Law (although she missed the opportunity to comment on the "burgeoning arts scene" like everybody else does). I would like to sincerely thank her for not mentioning the name of the sham house museum/banquet facility that she claims to have visited while here, and then admitting that New Beige had some passing something to do with "sailors" in Hawaii. I beg her to not do a book about whaling even though her wit, scholarship, and charm would completely blow Nat Philbrick -- and Rory Nugent for that matter -- off the shelves. And I appreciate that a woman who doesn't drive begins her book at the Rainbow Drive-In in Honolulu.
It should also be noted that, given the opportunity to take on the very same subject matter -- the effects of mikanele on Hawaii -- I would have turned out a novelty pamphlet explaining how Mele Kalikimaka ever happened.
Mahalo to you Sarah Vowell.

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