Stephen Rodefer Reading
I’ve been reading some work by the poet Stephen Rodefer lately. There are quite a few books of his to choose from at the library, as he’s been writing and publishing for some time. (I believe his first book was published around 1965, but don’t quote me on that one.) At any rate, I had the opportunity to go over to the university and hear him read earlier this week. I have to be honest with you here, and I hate to come across as negative and be judged for doing so, but I’m still not sure what to make of this guy. He is obviously a very smart man, as some of the poems he read he’d translated from French and I picked up on the inclusion of a little German in a few of the poems he read also. Plus, he writes often with a tone of sarcasm, which I find extremely difficult to do effectively. But he is quite eccentric and I had some trouble following a few of his poems, as they jumped from between what seemed to me were random topics. (In the introduction, it was said that Rodefer was thrown out of Cambridge, if that gives you any idea of his character.) On the surface, and this is very, very simplified, but Rodefer sort of just came off as an old man who liked to drink and write about sex. Obviously there’s more to him than this, but I couldn’t help but look at him as such at points in the reading. However, I must admit that the reading did give some additional clarity to Rodefer’s work and I think I enjoyed and understood his poems more at his reading than I did in my own individual reading of them.
Rodefer’s reading was divided into two sections; first he read some of his past work and then after a short break he read some of his more recent work and projected it onto the screen. A few of the poems that he read early on I really enjoyed. They seemed to have a theme of giving up on love or regret that related to love—and even in another poem, to school. These poems seemed to have more of a conventional flow to them I felt than his newer work. It did help that when Rodefer read his newer work it was projected onto a screen so that I could follow along. In this portion of the reading, I felt that he approached the work with varying tones and highlighted a change in the feel of the poem with his voice. This really interested me and I am curious as to why I noticed it more in the second half of the reading than the first.
One thing that I liked about this reading was that I came away from it with two big, deep ideas to think about. First, in the introduction the question was raised, What are we looking for in a poet these days? I’m not really sure I have an answer to this question, as poetry seems to do too many things to whittle it down to having one characteristic or purpose. Secondly, in addition to reading poetry, Rodefer shared some of his artwork, which was primarily paintings of phrases. One included a quote that he wrote down and believes he has just started to figure out: There’s always a place for a woman who knows how to fall off a pony in New York. Rodefer proposed that this meant that there is always a place for a woman that knows how to leave a man in New York, which taps into feminism and is an idea I am sort of fond of. I am curious though as to what other ways there are to interpret this.
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I saw Stephen read recently; I might go to a reading at his flat in Paris this June. He’s a character: as one of the founding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, he’s interested in rewriting language against itself and playing with the reader’s expectations. An excerpt from “Words in Works in Russian:”
…Whatever wears you out, you wear out
Just call the press HARP SEAL, Richard, and forget it
The nail is unison. I just want to be social and suck, writing
the treatise on suicide Not To Be, an incidental Spicerian stanza…
He skips from one thought to the next (not even waiting for line break, but switching horses midstream—or falling off the pony mid-NY, perhaps) in the space of a line—more difficult to do than it looks. A Rodefer poem is constantly turning its pockets inside out, picking apart pieces of lint, jingling spare change, poking a finger through a hole then righting the pocket and making obscene hand gestures inside it.
What are we looking for in a poet? What are we looking for in a musician? An artist? A baker? A candlestick maker? Lots of things. Someone asked me recently if the pretension surrounding poetry turned me off to poetry as a whole, which I thought was a ridiculous question—does the pretension/elitism surrounding the music scene turn anyone off to good music? Maybe, and I feel sorry for those people, because they’re missing out. Anyway, certainly someone’s looking for Stephen—sometimes I am, when I’m down on my luck and out of love, at the end of a bottle of whatever (that’s my preferred Rodefer reading time, but it’s just a personal preference). And there’s something about the man—I’ve heard he’s an alcoholic and a kleptomaniac; he looks like a jaded Michael Caine. He chokes out his words in tempo with the rattling of a ceiling vent, he snorts and coughs and snots and wheezes—and he makes you really believe the fucked-up shit he’s reading.
I’ve seen some of Stephen’s art as well; my personal favorite is NEVER (OHIO) AGAIN, but the pony one is amusing as well. I always interpreted it as drinking-related (fall off the wagon, fall off the pony), but it’s interesting he explained it as loss of love.
Keep reading Rodefer, Julia. And if you still don’t like it, then give it to a friend who reads Bukowski. Because it’s so much better.
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