Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  When Pete Dolack invited me to read at the 26th Annual Alternative NYD Spoken-Word/ Performance Extravaganza, I jumped at the chance to see and hear some of my downtown poet friends again. What better way to start the year than with poetry? As expected, the gathering at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Village was vastly and variously entertaining. A woman dedicated her three-minute reading to the animals killed by the Australian fires. A man punished his hand drum as he read in a monotone. Another read from behind a dwarf fir tree that she carried in above her head. Many poems read that afternoon could be charged with the lack of artfulness, but in their earnestness, their directness, their presence, they were more enjoyable than any verbal tricksiness of more accomplished readings. Against the frenzy of new year resolutions, which by definition looked to the future, the afternoon focused ...

It was a wonderful evening that, as Nemo put it, focused on the right thing, the work itself. Bob's book Lightly in the Good of Day collects poems written over the course of a decade. They are about family and friends--real and imaginary--nature, art and the trying conditions of existence. The turnout at Cornelia Street Cafe was strong. There was only standing room when the open-mic began. Valerie Mendelson, the painter of the landscape that appears on the book cover, came with her husband, JF. For the feature, the readers, Jane Ormerod, Adriana Scorpino, R. Nemo Hill, and Thomas Fucaloro, chose poems from the book that matched perfectly their very different reading styles. Jane read "In That Petal Flesh," Adriana read "Going Inside--Especially To Feel," Nemo read "Man, Can They," "Inside Your Expensive Watch"and "After Such Fall", and Thomas read "Take This Rose." The No Chance Ensemble, consisting of vocalists Bruce a...