Vancouver Review

Bare context

The 125 Vancouver Poetry Conference, sponsored by the City of Vancouver as part of Celebrate Vancouver 125, saw more than 70 poets give readings around town from October 19 to 22. I attended the Poetry Cabaret on Evening 2, at the Revue Theatre on Granville Island.

Cynical thoughts on poetry being declared as important enough

It was uplifting to see the Celebrate Vancouver 125 organizers acknowledge the relevance of the poetry community to the bones of this city. Celebrating sleek Skytrains and Olympic legacies are far more popular, but cultural pulses can’t be overlooked if we want our city to offer more than unaffordable housing and lululemon lifestyle aspirations. The organizers must have known that no other figure brings as much cultural mystique and authority than a poet behind a podium. After all, poetry is for really, really, deeply cultural people.

More thinly veiled cynicism

I’ve always had reservations about authors reading in public, especially at officially backed festivals. I love the idea of the in-the-flesh storyteller, but we can’t pretend that’s what it’s about anymore. I felt anxious for these readers: there’s the unspeakable disagreeableness of self-promotion, not to mention the chill that must accompany the thought of reading to a roomful of strangers. Never mind that I’ve always felt that poets and those who read poetry belong to the same tribe – still.

On possibilities

The idea of poet as promoter/entertainer isn’t impossible (see some bouts of spoken-word poetry if you want to see the possibilities), but print poetry isn’t the most obvious of genres to exploit. So, rather than attend a daylight reading where I’d probably have spent my time pondering how the poet struggles to address the “Here we are now, entertain us” factor, I opted for an evening cabaret reading. Poetry pimped out with cabaret styling just might work as both cultural pulse and entertainment, I figured. Besides, the darkness, the bar and the bonding that evolves when people sit in the dim together listening hard might take care of the devils whispering, Sell yourself, sell yourself.

Modest expectations

As I approached the venue, I wondered about the crowd. Would they be Ginsburgian hedonists ready to take what they could get? Or would the more likely scenario greet me: would it be like walking onto an earnest CBC radio set, where everyone has an engaging radio voice and can effortlessly toss off erudite, modestly elitist banter?

No worries

I shouldn’t have worried. The emcee, Billeh Nickerson, an established poet, writer and editor himself, set the irreverent tone immediately: he laid down the law on texting during readings (it’s disconcerting when an audience glows an alien blue) and, in a moment of inspired stage management, explained that a cell phone with Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald” would play if readers went on and on. Throughout the night, he encouraged the audience to engage in glass-rolling-down-the-aisle bacchanalian behaviour, charmingly mixed up names and syntax (well, I thought it was charming), and even dared to suggest on stage to a poet that his comma use was off – enough said?

Of course, the audience had its share of tweed and caps and island-dwelling patinas (how I envy island-dwellers), but I can safely assume no one wore lululemon. And, as the night proved, this crowd was ready to entertain the idea that poetry and cabaret could exist in the same sentence. They were really ready to laugh – laugh, not navel-gaze or consider the apt use of enjambment. (Note: a friend thinks she spotted Joni Mitchell, which I only mention because Joni Mitchell may be the only artist any country needs to maintain cultural integrity.)

The readers

The first reader, Srikanth Reddy, opened with the type of technical, meditative poetry that is splendid on a page but hard to appreciate the first time through. And it was odd watching people try to listen to this sort of “proper” poetry. But, after Reddy, most of the poets seemed to increasingly follow the theme that, although poetry may be best appreciated while one is alone, very alone, with scads of alone time to read lines over and over, it does have entertaining – if not exactly cabaret – possibilities.

Melanie Siebert’s impeccably crafted narrative selections from Deepwater Vee were much easier to latch on to. Then Antonette Rae stepped out with a crash, quite literally, as her cup slipped off the podium and broke. After much sweeping, she delivered her poetry – by memory: the storyteller had landed. Her experiences as an aging, transsexual prostitute dealing with her addiction and various species of assholes in the DTES might not have elicited head-nodding recognition, but since she carried off the performance with bawdiness and humour, the promise of cabaret finally appeared.

Steven Wright takes over

Matthew Zapruder was certainly ready to take over, if not in cabaret trappings, at least in cabaret-calibre laughter. I think I started feeling like I was at a Steven Wright performance (remember him?) after he read, “Saying pocket makes me feel potentially, but not yet busy” with perfect comedic – or was it poetic? – timing. David McGimpsey continued the groove with his “chubby sonnets,” with titles like “Bury me under the willows, but throw out my CD collection, it’s useless.” He delivered line after line that the audience simply roared at, like “I do regret writing fiction,” and, “Before the iPhone arrived, we lived like pigs,” and “Nobody, not even the rain, has such a hairy back” (ee cummings surely would approve).

Proper poetry muscles back in

The mood shifted once our new Poet Laureate, Evelyn Lau, read. Her venerable role will include many podium appearances, and she shared her trepidation about embarrassing herself in front of officials like Gregor Robinson. (I do hope that she will embarrass us all quite often and shake things up; everything is just so predicable these days. Did anyone else see the Stanley Cup Riot coming a mile away?) Her solemn poetry selections calmed the room right down, yet she still kept the audience connected to the stage.

The return of Wright

Suzanne Buffon brought us back to cabaret-decibel laughter. Although an award-winning “proper” poet (as, indeed, most of the readers were), after two and half years of mothering, she’d also taken to writing lists, such as, “Bad ideas that would probably sell,” like hamster camp, stationary tricycles, and diet ice; and “Guilty Pleasures,” like beating a child at checkers. Ken Babstock ended the night with a couple of formal poems, then plunged into a piece that followed the raucous, crowd-pleasing formula of a) one vulgar person, and b) a mode of transportation, for example, a “chicken rapist on a sailboat.” After some impressively offensive combinations, he ended it all with “Ahoy!” He said we weren’t to take it personally, but seriously. Indeed.

Stand-up poets

No, it wasn’t a let’s-peer-into-my-soul-together ending. But if a cabaret is more laughter than contemplation, more populist than esoteric, Babstock ended on the right note. Yet, after the lights went up, I still felt conflicted about asking poets to transform themselves into entertainers (and in this case, comedians). Then again, aside from Buffon, they were reading poetry that just happened to be entertaining – or to be read in an entertaining way. So perhaps we need not always typecast poets and poetry in formal, serious roles, as we are apt to do. In fact, this night made it clear to me that poets have a better sense of humour than many comedians.

Caroline Harvey is VR’s poetry editor