The Works: A Writers’ Salon (Events in the Twin Cities)
Wednesday night, after Vietnamese food, coffee in a café I'd never come across before, and two games of bowling (wherein I made a spare and a strike!), I attended this month's meeting of The Works: A Writers' Salon held in Uptown, Minneapolis.
It's for all these things--the range of great restaurants, the hundreds of cafés to explore, new opportunities for laughing (i.e., the bowling), and an active, diverse writing/arts culture--that I moved to the Twin Cities a few months back. Minneapolis and St. Paul have not disappointed. There is always something new and exciting to do.
The Works: A Writers' Salon, however, is a bit of a misnomer. It isn't a salon so much as 2 parts lecture + 1 part reading by participants (3 this time), the lecture giving the thinking behind the proffered poetry or prose. The presenters stand on stage in front of a microphone, while the audience sits in theatre seats. There's food and drink if you want, as the event is held at Bryant Lake Bowl, a hip restaurant/bar/bowling alley/local theatre. So we ate and drank while the participants discussed writing and spirituality that evening under stage lights.
I'm not one for sitting passively in seats and listening. Moreover, I grew bored by academic-style lectures in dark rooms years ago after attending, and then teaching, too many art history classes. This salon -- or "forum," as my friend attempted to style it -- felt stiff. By contrast, I attend a private salon in the city, where a largish group of artists, art critics, philosophers, and writers lounge about at someone's house and discuss a recent exhibition, a work in progress, or an essay while sipping wine and taking in the great art on the walls. I vast prefer that setting.
Still, I plan to return next month. Why? I'm a sucker for the stories (if not the academic, exhaustive explanations) of how a poem or story or essay came into being. The event achieved that, perhaps in spite of itself. For example, poet Emily Warn discussed list-making and naming in the Jewish tradition and in her poetry. She compared poetry and mysticism at length, seeing them as deeply akin to each other except for the fact that "the poet operates according to a psychosis." She also explained how defamiliarizing cultural mythologies in order to revive them was a revolutionary action, offering some examples from her work on forms of nothingness. I scribbled notes in order to have something to do with my hands.
Christian Boltanski, Les Enfants Perdus
What grabbed my attention, however, was her brief story of visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington. This came after her discussion of Jewish mysticism in Eastern Europe. Perhaps it matters that I've been to the museum and to Eastern Europe, because her naming opened up places and moments held inside me. I was walking the cemeteries in Prague, bending over the installation art in various places in Berlin, and standing in the middle of the Christian Boltanski exhibit of Les Enfants Perdus at the Minneapolis Art Institute. I was in all these places and more as Emily continued reading her lecture.
Emily was talking of the letter Yud, the smallest letter in the Jewish alphabet. It embodies the drop or the remnant of God. She focused on that remnant, because the 20th century seemed to represent when God withdrew. She went to Holocaust Museum, then, not to relearn the events and not to redeem the suffering. She wanted to know, to participate in the experience of that withdrawal. And as she described that experience and read her poem-list, her zooming in on the Yud, on the remnant, and on the withdrawal created fuzzy outlines of things and people -- much in the same vein as Boltanski's blowups of yearbook photos.
For a few moments, I was taken somewhere else. And in Peter O'Leary's discussion of his poetry, I was taken momentarily into a monastery in the French Alps. When Jim Rogers discussed his passion for cemeteries, I was brought back to the Cimetière du Montparnasse where I visited Duras' grave regularly during my travels to Paris. This is what I want from literature and from discussions of it.
If you're in or near the Twin Cities, the next event is December 2, 8pm, at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. 2 presentations are being given:
- Poetry film symposium with Todd Boss, Cass Dalglish, Angella Kassube, Jay Orff, Tom Schroeder, and Jonathan Thomas
- New media poetics with Thom Swiss
For more info or to submit a proposal, se: lightseydarst.com/theworks.html
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