We asked the poets to build a fire
I sit in a kind of awe this morning - fresh water, fresh sun. I am no longer a jagged thing in this life, but a thing soft on the wind, a thing of movement and light. On Tuesday, Benjamine and I agreed on the prompt unanimous, my mind has been w/ fire since. It feels like coming back home. It is easy in the sun, free and burning. Not desperate and spitting like fires in the freeze. I am at home in my city. I am an artist w/ community, we are building this fire together. To keep us warm, keep us working, keep us alive.
In everyone I meet, I am finding more and more ways to live, more and more ways to love. I’m saying, you’re a bit of me and I’m a bit of you. Our souls shine in remarkable mirrors, sequins catching the light and casting rainbows all across the room. My world is as tangible as yours. I know because I’ve heard your poetry. I am learning how it feels to be around you when you’re nervous and when you’re curious, when you’re surprised love was so easy to find. Love should never be hard to find, that’s what I’ve learned from life.
I parked the Soul by the State theater. Benjamine met up w/ me, microphone and amp and clipboard and wires carried all through our city. Then we watched the room fill up. We asked our community to help us build a fire. Poets brought wood. Poets brought kindling. Poets conjured flame. The mic was hot to the touch and sizzling as we moved the list along. We passed out scraps, collecting names for the hat. Not everyone signed up to read, but I saw everyone writing. I floated around half-feral in old silk. I was nervous about my piece but I was having such a good time.
Tea spilled at café tables. Haikus turned into sprawling meditations. There was friction and alchemy. I met Gail, in her sixties and just sitting at Novel for the day, but could I read a poem? Of course, of course! Her table filled up w/ one friend and one new friend, sisters of cups and poetry intergenerational; the whole table got up and read poems they wrote tonight! and pointing to us saying we convinced them. That alone moved me.
I went table to table, checking in and killing time. My friends compared me to America’s favorite dad, John Stamos Energy. I smiled more last night than I have in a bit. I left my books and the list and a ginger beer on the bookshelf behind the mic. Look at me, getting too comfortable, leaving my shit everywhere. I compiled the list, shaking the hat around and seeing what jumps out eager, eager, trusting the gods.
The Portland Cryptid started the show w/ a poem for the fire signs. Dakota asked me to take their photo up there and I caught one of them smiling. Lew stepped up, his jeans held w/ shoelace string and a poem that devoured - the entire thing circling, circling. A poem hungry, a poem dissatisfied, a poem hypnotizing. The Healer and Red and MC went one after the other, like the gods were in on an inside joke. A poet instructed us on how to literally build a fire, putting the night in poetic context. Gather materials and alchemize and burn, as if fire hasn’t been mythologized enough already. And I almost forgot Hill, last on the list - my friend who loves and forgives as easily as I do, sass put on for the audience before our goodnight. He spent the weekend building a nest in the woods behind his house, was showing me photos before the event ended.
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I N T H E R E C O R D I N G
Before we started on the list, both Benjamine and I shared a couple poems we had used as incendiary inspiration. Benjamine opened w/ Sylvia Plath and I followed w/ Diane Di Prima. In the recording, this is reversed for reasons of convenience.
I was fifth on the list, w/ a warning of violence. I held my energy tight in the core of me, a little haunted. It felt unfinished. It felt like not enough. It felt important anyway. Man on fire, man on fire. I thought about the time it takes to burn and I wrote in repetition, 3 series of 3, like ritual, like what fire asks of us. But when I was reading it, I got a little choked up and rushed. I read, the martyrs are on fire only once and held a beat of silence for the two unsaid. In that small room, it felt almost cruel to say it again, again.
When the poem ended, it would hang here in the room and not here in my body anymore. Fear of imperfection has stopped me in the past from writing about the pains of the world, but I’m practicing a bravery of perspective.
Half the time when poets say, I liked your piece they mean, I have felt similar to how you feel, I still do sometimes, sometimes it’s a feeling I live w/, I see me in you, I see the world in us. Sometimes that’s the point of poetry.
Benjamine almost inspired tears from me, their words all saccharine and sharp - how can we not love the free air? They didn’t give me a quote on their piece this time but as a friend and poetic admirer, I can draw some conclusions of my own. In their own way, Benjamine is preparing the hearth to light. In the flames go fears, regrets, bad behaviors. Fire has always been a symbol of purification and here, it is waiting, trusting time, unpredictably climbing. Benjamine conjures a you; it could be a lover or a friend or a crowd, ambiguous as all good poetry. Whoever it is, it is someone loved, needed, being read to. Promises are given and the poet finds a way through.
The flames rose higher as the list went on. Our pyre was one of poetry, sparks lapping and licking, singeing the fringe of the gods. Then whoosh, wind gone cold and sweeping the flames right out of the room, right into the city, right down Congress St and into the Jewel Box where the creatures all dance. An April night w/ sparkles in the air, everything purple and mostly gorgeous.
✺ In the spirit of the Internet, if anyone would like to participate virtually in the Workshop to some degree, be sure to follow Portland Poets Society on instagram and please get in touch w/ me somehow and we can develop that together.
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