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Vol. LXII, No. 27
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Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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Vol. LXII, No. 27
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Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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Introduced as “poets of place,” Eloise Bruce and Angelo Verga read their most recent pieces at the U.S. 1 Poets Invite at the Princeton Public Library last Wednesday. Their poems dealt with themes both serious and lighthearted.
Orienting her location in the “South as we would sift it today,” Ms. Bruce began with an elegy to Emmett Till on his 60th birthday. This was followed by a poem about New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.
Drawing appreciative murmurs from the audience, Ms. Bruce transported the listeners from the American South to an imagined delta in her poem, “Eden,” a shape poem that formed a sloping “Y” across the page, which she held up for the audience to see while explaining that it could be read in two ways, either from top to bottom, or across.
The octopus at the Wetlands Institute became the addressee of her next poem, which described its interactions with Ms. Bruce’s husband on the other side of the glass. Her poetry encompassed personal stories, long histories, and humorous anecdotes, all conjuring rich landscapes and spaces.
Mr. Verga was lauded by Lois Marie Harrod, who emceed the event, for the “poignant amusement and affection that he brings to his urban observations.” His work is site-specific to New York, and largely describes his movements and musings within the city.
The kinds of places he took listeners included the emergency psych ward at a city hospital, the dressing room of a clothing store, the former World Trade Center site, and the Telephone Bar on 2nd Avenue.
Most of Mr. Verga’s poems employ a first-person narrator, who alternately draws the listener in and pushes the listener away. He described encounters with members of his family, his various muses, and persons seen in passing. One poem, “Junkie,” which Mr. Verga mentioned that he had been trying to write for five years, viscerally described an addict’s torment in recovery, ending with the lines, “spitting tears, this/sad, this girl, very thin, who/is my daughter.”
The evening’s event concluded with an open read, in which members of the audience were invited to share their own poetry. While the topics and language of the poems varied widely, many of the works presented a problem that the author would work through within the poem, usually arriving at some respite or solution by the end.