Aaron Shurin @ Moe's: Poetry In Motion

Last night at the wonderful bibliographic emporium Moe’s Bookstore, on skuzzy & student-free Telegraph Avenue in beastly old Berkeley, my friend Aaron Shurin – who is co-director of the rather successful or so we hear Creative Writing MFA at USF – read from his new book of essayistic memoir pieces King Of Shadows. Amongst other things, poetry is on my mind (to the postage-stamp-sized extent that we know anything about it) since fellow USF blogger, nay award-bloody-winning blogging lucky bastard – and poet of some considerable renown – Dean Rader has responded to a partially rhetorical Comment of mine at his blog (“Now that we have pop music, why do we still need poetry?”, asketh the prof o’ pop) with a post that demands a retort from moi.

[Another Yes Comma El Oh El Exclamation Point moment. Blog posts that start with long loopy sentences. Blog posts without para breaks. Blog posts with intricate prose deliberately designed so you have to read more than once. Ah yes, we know all the tricks here at POP.]

On any evening when a sort of cheerful insomnia had left me not regretting the fun had while reading all night but hunting desperately for a pair of cocktail sticks to prop the old peepers ajar by six, still the juicy prospect of Aaron reading aloud would have forced us out of the door & down the sleazy but balmy early evening streets. Last night, there was the added incentive of checking out a real live poet, to see if there was something here that we could get from him (something aesthetic and/or something for our practical life – but not just another sociology lesson) but not from pop songs (as is proposed by Prof. Rader).

There was. Dean’s right. Only half-right but that’s another post. Promise.

But first, a sociology lesson!

So the prof is stumbling sleeplessly around the store after mangling his attempt to say Hi to Aaron, & Owen of Moe’s -- you know when you try to make an elegant interruption because it’s embarrassing if you stand there for too long saying nothing & all you manage to do is stop the conversation stone cold dead? -- and a young bespectacled chap comes up to the prof & asks, What’s going on here tonight?

POP: “Oh there’s a really brilliant writer reading from his book. I think it’s partly about being gay in San Francisco in the sixties. He really is a really brilliant writer.”

Hardly had we turned from glancing over our left shoulder to indicate the really brilliant writer & back to our innocent inquisitor than he had fled the bookstore faster than you can say pickled amygdala. Perhaps the sudden & surprising prospect of a really brilliant writer reading in a bookstore of an evening led to our new friend’s quantum-esque flight response.

[We have often pondered the seriously interesting question of when & how gay men went from being pooftahs & queens who were objects of scorn for threatened straight men & clueless stand-up comics (do yourself a favour & find – it won’t be easy -- Trevor Griffiths’ outstanding TV/play Comedians), to predatory beasts who put the fear of queer into poor helpless little sissies. And, is this progress? Free drinks at the White Horse to anyone who can answer the first question. We maintain however that the stereotype of the threatening gay male is not a media construct but a fairly predictable & maybe not all-bad outgrowth of a society in which gay sexuality is newly & strangely for some folks, really out. The prof & his straight friends will sometimes make fun of each other for being queer (or hookers but that was just my bad taste) & the prof has a running gag that Fosters (a different category of bad taste) is gay beer which seems to amuse in the right company. But none of us is [note correct use of is not are – The Prof.] homophobic or inclined to prejudice or violence towards gay men or women. Of course the gay beer jape plays on the earlier, pooftah stereotype. While splendidly indicting our macho cousins from Down Under.]

Anyway. The kid ran from the store.

Even then a mother & her daughter (who looked at least 13-ish) got up loudly & left, while Aaron was reading from his first piece, just 3 or 4 minutes in! If mommy thought she was shielding her child from any further mention of LSD, she surely did nothing to further her education in good manners.

Nonetheless, Aaron read so beautifully that all thought of a nice early night with a packet of biscuits & a magazine disappeared from my mind. Well, not completely. But the density of this kind of poetic writing offers us something that pop music cannot, through its intimate exploration of individual words, phrases & images. Leonard Cohen & The Usual Suspects (take your pick: Johnson, Dylan, Syd, Joni, Lou, Lennon, R.Davies, Springsteen, Patti S, Mark E, Chuck D, the 2 Nicks, Hell, Rollins, Costello, Van M, Tom W, Morrissey, Tennant, Paddy Mac, Elizabeth Fraser, Jarvis, Damon, poor Thom, Bjork, Dizzee, and – my fave & also the dearly-departed Tony Wilson’s, Shaun Ryder) could be invoked but Dean’s point stands, that pop lyrics do not generally do this kind of thing, nor are they meant for that purpose.

Of course, you didn’t need to come here to discover that.

This passage, for its delicate balance of melancholy, regret & irony, and for its wisdom, has rather caught the prof’s attention:

“I don’t actually believe in reincarnation, have no Buddhist training and little natural Buddhist sympathy… I’ve always thought the purpose of reincarnation would be to revel in the body not drop it… You are in life to relish the embodiment, and if it’s just a sensory dance – then love the illusion!”

Aaron Shurin’s King Of Shadows is a dense & entertaining testament to that assertion.

And, it has stuff like this: “Nobody wants to hear someone else’s dream.”