People go to readings for the people. We could swim the stream of Tumblrs and tweets for days, but the warmth of a computer screen can't keep Brooklyn kids from rubbing elbows and drinking beers and listening to each other's work aloud. That's true for alt lit, too, the genre of writing around or about the Internet that's emerged over the past two years in New York City (think Tao Lin-esque Gchat prose.)
Though new and experimental, alt lit is oddly bereft of women, like other genres of literature. Mellow Pages, an experimental library and alt lit haven in Brooklyn, proposed a New Year's resolution for 2014: "all readings or performances or events where people are doing things need to have at least 50 percent of the performers/readers/doers of things be female." Mellow Pages' stake in gender equity comes after writer Safy-Hallan Farah stated the obvious: alt lit's mostly a bunch of (great) white doods. Her piece sent the scene into a mid-life crisis. Pale stale male writers took a second to look up from their iPhones to realize, "Yeah, I guess everyone does kinda look the same."
This isn't to say in the micro-microcosm of poetry readings in New York, "gender" and "performance" aren't hot topics. But often, it's in that annoying Hot Topic way, where those kids wear a Ramones T-shirt but only know two of their songs. New Agendas, which took place last weekend at the gallery Macie Gransion, was a reading that read differently. As host Andrew Durbin put it to me, it was about "doing more than just talking about how ideas on gender have shifted, but demonstrating how those shifts are being lived."
In other words, instead of filling up a quota, New Agendas invited readers whose in-person performance of gender––through their voices, appearances, and personal style––breathed life into their poetry. The lineup of readers—Juliana Huxtable, Joon Oluchi Lee, Trisha Low, and Bunny Rogers—had a stage presence to rival 1998's VH1 Divas. Like the TV special with Mariah, Aretha, Shania, and Celine, each diva's individual work was only upped by the amount of collective awe they inspired when sharing a stage.
Poet Bunny Rogers read first, in a deep voice that belied her girly outfit: She wore her long hair down to her waist, a baby blue headband framing her face. The quivering tone of her voice underlined the depravity in her verse, adding to her poetry’s deadpan directness. Joon Oluchi Lee read next, his red-stained lips perfectly juxtaposed with rough leather combat boots. The professor of gender and performance studies at RISD shared a selection from his latest book, Lace Sick Bag. His story of a gay couple planning flower arrangements for their orgy tickled the crowd. Through his phrases, the characters slipped in and out of femme or boyish, turning from tough guys to girls pulling on their skirts.
After a brief smoke break, Trisha Low took the stage, reading a selection from The Compleat Purge, her latest release. Low embodied poetics and performed hysteria; the way she related her spiraling verses made the room spin with her. Party queen Juliana Huxtable solidified the night as exceptional. Her poetry was printed on neon yellow paper, the only thing brighter than the hot pink socks underneath her Docs. Her words weren’t necessarily rushed, but they also didn’t wait to be understood. She preached on subjects as diverse as NSA surveillance and TRANS* bodies, truths
Though new and experimental, alt lit is oddly bereft of women, like other genres of literature. Mellow Pages, an experimental library and alt lit haven in Brooklyn, proposed a New Year's resolution for 2014: "all readings or performances or events where people are doing things need to have at least 50 percent of the performers/readers/doers of things be female." Mellow Pages' stake in gender equity comes after writer Safy-Hallan Farah stated the obvious: alt lit's mostly a bunch of (great) white doods. Her piece sent the scene into a mid-life crisis. Pale stale male writers took a second to look up from their iPhones to realize, "Yeah, I guess everyone does kinda look the same."
This isn't to say in the micro-microcosm of poetry readings in New York, "gender" and "performance" aren't hot topics. But often, it's in that annoying Hot Topic way, where those kids wear a Ramones T-shirt but only know two of their songs. New Agendas, which took place last weekend at the gallery Macie Gransion, was a reading that read differently. As host Andrew Durbin put it to me, it was about "doing more than just talking about how ideas on gender have shifted, but demonstrating how those shifts are being lived."
In other words, instead of filling up a quota, New Agendas invited readers whose in-person performance of gender––through their voices, appearances, and personal style––breathed life into their poetry. The lineup of readers—Juliana Huxtable, Joon Oluchi Lee, Trisha Low, and Bunny Rogers—had a stage presence to rival 1998's VH1 Divas. Like the TV special with Mariah, Aretha, Shania, and Celine, each diva's individual work was only upped by the amount of collective awe they inspired when sharing a stage.
Poet Bunny Rogers read first, in a deep voice that belied her girly outfit: She wore her long hair down to her waist, a baby blue headband framing her face. The quivering tone of her voice underlined the depravity in her verse, adding to her poetry’s deadpan directness. Joon Oluchi Lee read next, his red-stained lips perfectly juxtaposed with rough leather combat boots. The professor of gender and performance studies at RISD shared a selection from his latest book, Lace Sick Bag. His story of a gay couple planning flower arrangements for their orgy tickled the crowd. Through his phrases, the characters slipped in and out of femme or boyish, turning from tough guys to girls pulling on their skirts.
After a brief smoke break, Trisha Low took the stage, reading a selection from The Compleat Purge, her latest release. Low embodied poetics and performed hysteria; the way she related her spiraling verses made the room spin with her. Party queen Juliana Huxtable solidified the night as exceptional. Her poetry was printed on neon yellow paper, the only thing brighter than the hot pink socks underneath her Docs. Her words weren’t necessarily rushed, but they also didn’t wait to be understood. She preached on subjects as diverse as NSA surveillance and TRANS* bodies, truths