The deep unnatural depression that Andrea Gibson brings to me
I've seen Andrea Gibson live before, you know. She came to the North Star Cafe on a Tuesday night and all i knew is that she was a big deal. A slam poet of the top tier and sure she killed that night but she looked nothing like her poetry. Performers should look like their poetry, mine does, its jumbled and trembling but opinionated and obese. It needs to represent me and for a while I thought most people's work looked like them. Buddy Wakefield looks just as weird as his poetry trust me but Andrea Gibson looks nothing like her verse.
She is small, and I recall even sometimes feeling like she was a scared looking person. Anyone who has read at an open mic was scared and should have been but most of the top tier mask it professionally. Like Jack McCarthy before her I didn't value her as much in person as when I got her book, I guess being somewhat of a dink I looked at her and shrugged. A poet, like the rest of us trembling like a leaf to deliver the thoughts she so carefully ironed and starched. I undervalued her until I purchased her book POLE DANCING TO GOSPEL HYMNS and I have spent a lot of time combing through it. I knew from the first poem that I had fucked up, this is the T S Elliot of slam poetry I swear. The metaphors come together so well that they become a community of words calling back to one another and each line is something you want to write down and use as the basis for a new poem. They don't seem like enough, ideas she just stumbles upon are too fantastically intricate and interesting to be left where they are. I felt that way about The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and now I feel that way about at least six or seven of the poems in her book.
Great poets depress me intensely, reading this made me never want to write poetry again. I honestly contemplated going right back to the short story after the third piece it is called BIRTHDAY for jenn. I was wrong because she is like her poetry, her verse is a human being raging against her own frailty beating it and beating it with lyrical strength unmatched until she feels she can live in a world with teeth so sharp.
She makes me envious and jealous and appreciative and I just wish I she could read this. I just wish I had stood human to human with her and hugged her to be able to tell people I did.
Here is hoping any of this makes sense to the few who read it.
She is small, and I recall even sometimes feeling like she was a scared looking person. Anyone who has read at an open mic was scared and should have been but most of the top tier mask it professionally. Like Jack McCarthy before her I didn't value her as much in person as when I got her book, I guess being somewhat of a dink I looked at her and shrugged. A poet, like the rest of us trembling like a leaf to deliver the thoughts she so carefully ironed and starched. I undervalued her until I purchased her book POLE DANCING TO GOSPEL HYMNS and I have spent a lot of time combing through it. I knew from the first poem that I had fucked up, this is the T S Elliot of slam poetry I swear. The metaphors come together so well that they become a community of words calling back to one another and each line is something you want to write down and use as the basis for a new poem. They don't seem like enough, ideas she just stumbles upon are too fantastically intricate and interesting to be left where they are. I felt that way about The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and now I feel that way about at least six or seven of the poems in her book.
Great poets depress me intensely, reading this made me never want to write poetry again. I honestly contemplated going right back to the short story after the third piece it is called BIRTHDAY for jenn. I was wrong because she is like her poetry, her verse is a human being raging against her own frailty beating it and beating it with lyrical strength unmatched until she feels she can live in a world with teeth so sharp.
She makes me envious and jealous and appreciative and I just wish I she could read this. I just wish I had stood human to human with her and hugged her to be able to tell people I did.
Here is hoping any of this makes sense to the few who read it.
posted by veritas2 at
4:03 PM
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