Love Begins with a Bench

Should anyone really be surprised when poets are late to their own reading?

Luckily people who come to poetry readings on a Sunday afternoon aren't the types that mind waiting around for poetry, either. And only two of the three were late, so the audience would have gotten poetry one way or another, that was for damn sure.

Daniel Coudriet,a resident of both Richmond and Argentina, led the charge reading from his new chapbook. Many of his poems had Spanish names, like the one with the emotional line, "Please forgive me for ending here."

In "Sleepers" he read, "Will you be there nearly naked and goose-pimpled at dawn?" evoking a strong visual. Another poem was about having been attacked by geese at Byrd Lake as a child, although he admitted that the poem took off in directions unrelated to his incident.

"Some of these images are supposed to be ridiculous," he explained after reading a poem about pollen in his pants.

Admitting that he wasn't really watching the time, he assured the group that, "If you rush the podium, I will stop." Not likely with this group.

Chris Tonelli read next and I loved the slow and measured way he read.  The inspiration for the poetry he had written was Noh theater, so it had a spare quality to it, much the way the Japanese theater form does.

"Underneath the secret I keep about myself," he read from "Bonsai," acknowledging a universal truth. In "Crows" he read, "I've been meaning to rid myself of will; without will, there is no failure."

"Doubt is the air that I breathe through my never-changing mouth," came from, surprise, "Mouth." In what he referred to as sort of the title track of his book, "Theater" he read, "I am losing my emptiness."

Debrah Morkun, the only punctual poet in the bunch, projected her voice in a distinctly theatrical way as she read. Often she did not give poem titles (or else they were untitled), but just launched into her vivid words.

"Love begins with a bench," she read, allowing that it was as good a place as any. "The planets, they seem fidgety," she read from "Mother." I can see fidgety planets in my head now.

I appreciated the evocative imagery of "The tree brings language up through the complacency of soil," imagining words sprouting like plants.

"You can only go as far as walking can take you," she read, barely looking at the page.

Let's just say that poets don't need to be on time. They only need to be willing to read their poetry to a room full of rapt listeners.

Time is a man-made construct, after all, and poets are only marginally acknowledging this world anyway.