I’ve had two, what I would call, “rockstar experiences.” The first was during the ’96 or ’97 H.O.R.D.E Festival in northern California when Lenny Kravitz took the stage. He was dressed in a skin-tight, silver, sleeveless jump suit that glinted sunlight as he moved. I had seen him swing his dreadlocks on TV, but seeing him work in real time was something else altogether.
At one point, he quit playing suddenly and back away from the mic. ”S$&#,” he said, “I almost got electrocuted.” A brief pause followed. I was afraid he’d been injured, but he went back to playing soon after a few roadies came on stage and tinkered with the equipment. The mishap just made him seem cooler.
I was 23 or 24 years old and had been to a lot of other rock shows, in both auditoriums and tiny dives. But Lenny’s performance was different. He seemed to blast through whatever conventions I was trying to live up to. His performance was energetic and primal. I now have a bit more compassion for those young women screaming after the Beatles.
My second “rockstar experience” actually took place at a poetry reading. That night, however, the feeling was transformed into something more important and lasting–an appreciation of art that required effort.
This was in the early spring of 2001 or 2002, which would have meant I was 28 or 29 years old. That night I sat in the balcony of the Babson College’s Sorenson Theater. I had gotten there early so I could get a good seat. I wanted an unobstructed view of my favorite poet, CK Williams, the evening’s featured reader. At one point, I looked at the row of chairs below me and there he was, walking up the center aisle towards the stage. It was cold out, deep winter–February, I think–and he wore a thick drab-colored coat. He looked tall and thin, his arms hung loose from his shoulders. I fought back feelings of rockstar admiration for him, which were entirely unexpected. But the emotion quickly changed as soon as he started reading. I was not bowled over by sound and imagery. I had to listen up. And his words immediately appealed to my intellect and its complex, subtler set of emotions.
William’s poem, “First Desires,” speaks to the challenges and frustrations we must endure to appreciate art. (Read it on the New Yorker’s website.) When first listening to classical music, we try to “get it” beyond the welling up of emotion. At first, “there are only volumes and velocities thickenings and thinnings…” These “touch within you, through your body, to be part of you/and then apart from you.” You want to learn more, but even when you do get something, “the grainy timbre of the single violin, the/ardent arpeggios of the horn,” there are still “uneases and confusions left, an/ache, a sense of longing…” You want to blame “a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you knew it was more likely) you.”
CK William’s poem both embodies the struggle and rewards of art. Any appreciation of art demands effort on the part of the viewer/listener/reader. Our initial emotional responses quickly fade unless we are patient and cultivate a kind of deeper understanding. I often feel incapable of moving beyond the my initial experiences with a work of art, especially if I don’t seem to “get it.” I may even blame the work when it presents a challenge.
Poetry can be like that for me. I love poetry, even try and write it sometimes, but it’s often so hard to grasp, and I get lazy. But poetry rewards are many.
For the past several months, I’ve been enrolled in Goucher College’s MFA in creative nonfiction writing program. Last semester, my advisor was Richard Todd. He announced at the start that we would be reading and discussing poetry instead nonfiction by saying the language would be good for us. Read for pleasure, he said, and get the voices the best users of our language into your heads. “This is very purifying diction,” he said. ”It washes out some of the toxins.”
