I Killed, I Died: Banter, self-destruction, and the poetry reading

Abstract

I Killed, I DiedBanter, self-destruction, and the poetry reading Douglas Kearney (bio) This lecture about being funny. Funny at poetry readings. This lecture about how to be reading poetry at poetry readings is to be being funny. This lecture about the tripartite poetry reading ecosystem, where the n in “econ” is silent, especially when the N-words are not. This lecture about how revealing what one’s fixed to begin often falls between an ending and “this next one’s called” at a poetry reading, and how funny it can be to find yourself, there, banked [End Page 19] before and betwixt poems. Let’s call that space of potential revelation an interstice. And when one acts into it, let’s call it banter. And by way of that banter, you mean to reveal something more about what you’ve revealed in the poem itself, which is why you’re where you are. Before something. Betwixt others. Say you feel your poem says it all, maybe you say nothing, save: “This one’s called—” And if you feel your poem says it all, maybe you still say something more. Let’s call that funny. This lecture about how when I say funny I mean like telling jokes: Why did the chicken cross the road? And this lecture about how when I say funny like telling jokes, I also mean: Why did the poet keep reading poems about a miscarriage? And funny like: Why did the audience clap? And this lecture about how to be funny funny funny reading poetry at a poetry reading somewhere. So: as the applause frittered, this poet quipped: It’s okay to clap. The baby would have been Black. My next poem is called— This lecture about Nina Simone’s mojowork and the Black Took Collective’s collective shade. This lecture about dancing bears and an eight-inch thick, award-winning concrete wall in Tucson. This lecture about a miscarriage. This lecture’s going to be funny as all hell. This one’s called “I Killed, I Died.” ________ being funny at poetry readings is easy because poetry readings are already funny. Lesson one: show up at poetry reading and read poetry. You hilarious. This lecture’s called “I Killed, I Died.” But it’s called more than that, otherwise you may not know what I’m fixed to begin. In standup comic argot, some say to die is to have a shit set. You perform seeking laughter, yet get none. Conversely, to kill is to [End Page 20] work a great set: the crowd reacts exactly as you’d have them. In this rhetorical order, being funny smacks of combat. I offer that the “funny” that doesn’t mean joke, but “funny” as in an effed, uneasy dynamic—the ill feel below many poetry readings—is also ontologically violent. That violence comes up without even having to dredge a masculinist grammar, à la comedian Cristina Ouch, who marked in her essay “Stand-Up Comedy Is Not Dying, Your Privilege Is” that U.S. standup been rooted in white guyness since Twain. Trust, a bit on ontological violence kinda sorta coming soon, but patience: the bear is not yet in its rumpled tutu. All this to say, the violence folded into this lecture’s title is not baggage; that is, it needs no sly unpacking. Still, the subtitle, falling there between it and the lecture, opens the bag. This lecture about: What happens at the reading when we come to unpack what we think we packed in the poem and find the poetry reading itself is just another bag. Only, a trickbag. This lecture is called “I Killed, I Died: Banter, Self-Destruction and the Poetry Reading.” A joke: What do you call it when people who can probably read come to an event to attend other people reading what they’ve often already read? But seriously, folx. Let me tell you about this one time in Tucson at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center for The Poetry off the Page symposium. That was 2012, but for years prior, my wife, Nicole, and I were a heterosexist white supremacist’s dream...