An Orgy of Quiet Recollection
Dodie Bellamy

What do poets think of each other's writing? Are marathon festivals a good way to present poetry to other poets? Dodie Bellamy reports on this year's San Francisco Poetry Marathon, featuring readings through August.

Trane DeVore reading at the Bay Area Poetry Marathon (2004) (Photo: Graham Lawler)

The Bay Area Poetry Marathon, organized by the husband and wife team of Joseph Lease and Donna de la Perriere, opened May 29 at The Lab, a performance space in the seediest part of San Francisco's ultra-hip Mission District. Three more full days of readings will be held through August, with locations alternating between The Lab and the downtown Oakland art gallery and performance space 21 Grand.

Half an hour late, de la Perriere disposed with any mission statement and convened the reading with a businesslike approach—we know why we're here, let's get down to it. Nine poets read that afternoon, and I sat among the crowd of 25 (which would swell to 70 by the evening readings) scattered on folding chairs throughout the bare gallery. The large windowless room was freezing, downright sepulchral. We huddled in jackets and scarves as poet after poet stood in the spotlight, their only props a mic and music stand. Taylor Brady dramatically tossed each page to the floor as he finished reading it. His line, "surely every grandeur groans for an orgy of quiet recollection," mirrored the serious gentility of the affair. The restroom was down the hall, the door located conspicuously behind the readers. I would later feel dozens of eyes on my back as I raced out just as Brent Cunningham was taking the stage.

These were experimental readings, missing the glamorous catharsis of slam. On the experimental poetry scene, where financial gain is rarely an issue, all poets can amass is cultural capital—and that within a narrow range, as few non-poets read the work. In this small world, a festival offers a rare opportunity for excess, for large audiences. "Wow, there's a lot of us," we marvel. "So many of us believe that poetry matters!" But it's not necessarily a lovefest. No matter who's reading, a quick glance around the audience reveals the covert rolling of eyes and exaggerated, silent mouthing of opinions. We've got frail egos, each of us. Then there was the thorny question of the "afternoon poets" versus the "evening poets." In the evenings, de la Perriere and Lease programmed Rae Armantrout, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Robert Hass—the heavyweights. Afternoon readers, with a few exceptions, tend to be younger poets. I heard more than one poet grumble, "I'm just an afternoon reader."

De la Perriere's a bubbly, ebullient woman with cascades of dark red hair. Lease looks more serious, with his wild Byronic mane and intense gaze. They moved to the Bay Area a mere year ago—newcomers importing the energy of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon, which they curated and directed from 2001-2003. Before them, the poet Aaron Kiely singlehandedly ran the Boston Alternative Poetry Festival from 1998-2000. He recalls, "I was 27 and writing poetry in Boston and it was getting weirder and weirder (the poetry) and I felt alone—my friend handed me Primary Trouble, the anthology from Talisman and I read it and decided I wanted to try to bring people to Boston, since no one (it seemed to me) ever came to Boston." And come they did—60 poets a year, about half of them from New York City or further.

Poet Maria Damon at the Bay Area Poet’s Theater festival  (Photo: Kevin Killian)

Kiely's inaugural festival was packed from opening night. Daniel Bouchard, the opening reader at the first festival, began with a poem by Robert Frost, with the justification, "It was called the Alternative Poetry Festival, and I figured Frost would be alternative to that crowd." With its poetry scene so much smaller than San Francisco's, Boston's festivals depend on eager outsiders. Lease remembers that the year before he read at the Boston Poetry Marathon, the poet Dana Ward "took a bus all the way from Cincinnati, just to be in the audience." In Boston, poets were given a lot of leeway. Bouchard still speaks ruefully of poets who'd been allotted 15 minutes, but took 40. One imported poet infamously read for an hour and a half. There's something awesome about a single person onstage performing such a spectacle of rude, glorious self-indulgence. De la Perriere jokes that by the end of a full weekend of poetry, she felt like saying, "Get away from me. No more poetry!"

At this year's San Francisco Marathon, when the first reader, Stephen Ajay, began with, "I'm going to read 12 poems," my stomach tightened. Fortunately the poets—including Ajay—kept to the 20-minute limit, with no one going over by more than a few minutes. When Susan Gevirtz took the stage and announced, "I'm going to read for ten minutes," she received chuckles of appreciation. Reading under the limit is a near-heroic gesture, putting the needs of others above one's own ego.

During a break, Trane DeVore told me that I might write about the marathon in terms of bodily sensations, how many cups of coffee I drank, how many grams of caffeine were buzzing my system, etc. When I mentioned the mixture of trepidation and excitement these events induce, DeVore replied that with nine hours of it, "You give up the agony and experience the ecstasy."

I recall the Thanksgiving I drove to the monarch butterfly sanctuary in Santa Cruz. The monarchs journey 2,500 miles to spend the winter there. Millions of butterflies were hanging from 40-foot trees, brown mottled on outside, with wisps of orange flutters. The branches felt alive. And at a marathon reading, poetry too feels alive. The path of least resistance, we learned, is to listen. There's a shift in one's ability to take it in. I was fidgety during the afternoon, but in the evening, enrapt, immersed in it, and, despite every resistance, thoroughly enjoying myself.

Pink Steam, a collection of Dodie Bellamy's stories, memoirs, and memoir-esque essays, has just been published by San Francisco's Suspect Thoughts Press. She was the director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center for five years.