Review: Poetry Reading by George Wallace
I met George Wallace Saturday night at the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. Not the infamous, now deceased, politician, but the much more modest — and very alive — Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York. Turns out, Mr. Wallace is in Oklahoma for two readings — one was in Norman on Sunday, and the second is this evening (Monday, July 14) at 7:30 pm, University of Central Oklahoma campus library, in Edmond, Oklahoma.
I happened to be in line, in front of George and the ladies who are escorting him on his visit to Oklahoma, waiting to order "Indian Tacos". Now, when I don't have someone to visit with, I inveterately eaves-drop. One of the women visiting with George asked him if he listened to songs as a type of poetry. He responded that he preferred to listen to songs on their own merit — it seemed to him that the music and lyrics were too closely related to be separated. She began to conjecture whether Woody Guthrie considered himself a poet, noting that Woody often typed out his lyrics.
Well, this was something I knew a little about. I turned around and told them the story of Woody's work for the Department of the Interior. Woody was hired to write the sound track for a documentary on the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. Every day, he would get up and type lyrics on an old manual typewriter — according to many sources (including
Joe Klein's excellent biography), this was the most prolific period of Woody's life — an astonishing number of songs in a matter of 10-14 days. Many of Woody's best-known songs were written there, including "Pastures of Plenty" and "Roll On, Columbia".
It just so happened that, as we were visiting, Ellis Paul was singing "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key." I was then able to tell the story of how the Guthrie family had found a trunk full of Woody's lyrics with no music, and how Sarah (Woody's only surviving sibling) contracted with English folk singer Billy Bragg to set these lyrics to music. "Minor Key" is one of these songs. Mr. Wallace was especially interested in the fact that Woody wrote these lyrics while he lived in New York.
I told him the cd was titled
Mermaid Avenue, after the street the Guthrie family lived on. "I'm not familiar with that street", George said, "Where is it?" "I'm not sure," I said, "I think it's in Brooklyn." Subsequent research has revealed that Mermaid Avenue is in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. He asked if I recommended the cd, and I said I thought he'd enjoy it.
Well, we got our tacos and I rejoined Elsie. I'd eaten less than half my taco when George came by, holding a copy of
Mermaid Avenue — which, as it turned out, was the last copy in the music tent. George said, "I'm really excited to get this. I wanted to write an article about my visit, and this gives me a good 'New York' angle." Naturally, I asked why he was visiting Oklahoma, and he told me about his readings. Later on, he brought by one of his hosts — Carol Hamilton, a former Oklahoma Poet Laureate — to fill Elsie & I in on the details of times and places.
Now, all of this may seem a little self-serving, but I hope it gives a sense of what a genuinely nice person Mr. George Wallace is. Needless to say, I attended his reading in Norman Sunday afternoon.
He opened the reading with what he described as a poem in the "surreal" style, "Because":
because your hands are a theater and your eyelashes makeup
and your smile is a nightclub where everything always happens
and your ears are minor characters in a silent film overacting in the old ways ...
He continued with "in the used bookstore", an amusing poem which achieved its affect by changing only a couple of lines (or words) in each stanza. He followed this with "god spins out", a humorous poem which I interpret to reflect religious plurality. He also read "this country she is traveling through", which included the lines "August in the salt flat she boiled all day" and "if only the linoleum sun were not that shade of orange."
Mr. Wallace concluded the reading with the title poem from his latest collection,
swimming through water. For reasons I can't go into here, the book is bilingual in English and Italian. Before he read the poem, he asked if anyone in the audience spoke Italian; and the lady on my right allowed as she could read it passably well. So George read the poem in English, then Jenette read it in Italian (with a bit of a French and Spanish accent). This was a true treat!
Each line of the poem begins "some folks" — for example, the opening line "some folks get the message late but they get the message". The lines which stood out for me were "some folks are the message carried by a gulfstream of fresh water / some folks are water passing through water passing through oceans / some folks dance through water like diamonds some folks dance through walls like stars".
George seems to prefer the long line, although the longest poem he read — about a particular moment in a Mets/Yankees game — was two pages long, single-spaced typewritten. What I heard was marked by an intimate, conversational tone, with striking images such as I hope the examples I've shared demonstrate.
Tonight's reading is at 7:30 pm in the library on the University of Central Oklahoma campus in Edmond, OK. I strongly encourage folk within driving distance to make the pilgrimage. More may be learned about George Wallace and his poetry through his on-line magazine
Poetry Bay.
14.July.2003, 4:30 a.m.
