listen to kyle bang

I will admit, I had read no more than three poems by Mary Jo Bang before attending the reading she gave at Nebraska Wesleyan University last night. I had heard good things from some of my writer friends over the years. I was intrigued.

The reading began with an introduction that ended with the most appropriate phrase I think I've ever heard at a poetry reading, "Now let's listen to Mary Jo Bang." The playfulness of language was so apparent in the way Mary Jo was going to read by banging out poems. Whether or not this was her given name from birth isn't necessarily important, but it did cause me to question identity, generally and in the poet herself. An interesting device, intentional or otherwise, for a reader or listener who is just beginning to invest themselves in a poet's work.

The unfortunate aspect of poetry readings, at least for myself, is that they are extremely distracting. Not necessarily because of things going on in one's periphery, rather the poems and the poet specifically. If I hear a line that interests me, it distracts my ability to focus on the next line. Missteps by the poet and a poet retracing their steps by re-reading a line without the appropriate breath all kick my attention around in ways that lose the poem. These distractions are magnified if a listener has not invested themselves in a poet beforehand.

Regardless, Mary Jo Bang mentioned her interest in experimenting with language (dare I say artifice?). But an aspect of her poetics that interested me even more was her interest in the combination of experiment and narrative. Not necessarily narrative in the way one would think of a traditional narrative poem, but rather the ability to affect a reader with some sort of conclusive feeling at the end of a poem that ties human experience together. The ability to satisfy both, feelings of bewilderment and excitement through the playfulness of language, as well as a connection to a reader in some sort of living way, is something that has interested and influenced my own writing.

Mary Jo Bang likely directs a reader more so than other poets more vested in a "Language School" approach. By directs, I'm trying to get across an idea of a reader following words, phrases, and sentences in a way that one might possibly follow a friend's voice in a conversation about baseball. My interaction with something like Lyn Hejinian's texts, on the other hand, are limiting in certain ways, but unconfined in other ways. Words are limited in their ability to produce a sort of meaning that hold traditional society's standards of utility. However because those standards are denied, a reader is freed to experience the poem for what it is, nothing more than a rock or a tree, as it were. Mary Jo Bang's texts, from what I heard last night, are similar to this to a point. She does seem to utilize language's traditional standards more so than some of her contemporaries, however, but I think she does it in a way that does miss the mark of an extremely daring poetry. Where along this spectrum of utility a poet places themselves is a question one needs to answer in order to understand a poet's poetics and approach.

Maybe it's because I've been reading and editing so many poems lately, but there were times during the reading where I had the desire to bounce some things off of the poet. I started thinking about the periods of a poet's life and how, eventually, one will likely reach a point where input from others isn't necessarily expected, or possibly even appreciated. I understand that workshops aren't at a very high level of priority for poets who have been writing for a long period of time, and even less of a priority for those few poets whose poetry has been validated as much as a poet such as Mary Jo bang. When she says a poem is finished, I guess her poem is finished. After it is in a book, it isn't polite to say, "did you ever think about doing this?" But if Walt Whitman can mess with Leaves of Grass a gazillion times after it was originally published, I don't see why I couldn't when the time comes. I guess I just don't know how it works. I'm afraid to grow up and lose all of my friends and have everyone around me too afraid to tell me when something does not work. Always tell me. Please.