Like a Church (or: Tedious Sacraments)
Jun 29, 2025
From Jesse Nathan's "January 31," in Poetry Magazine:
I’m in the living room
reading aloud the news from Rome
when Josie tells me he hates poetry readings. Says that’s where poets
drown their poems
in the lake of enunciation.
LOL -- yeah, I kind of get this. But what most caught my eye was the narrator's response to this provocation:
Guess I agree, I say. But maybe
these events are like church,
sometimes tedious
but reflecting a desire among the faithful
to make a sacrament.
This idea that something is "like church" always catches my eye. When studying religion and activism in the 1960s, I saw this sentiment quite a bit in the context of the counterculture or certain aspects of protest. I want to (loosely, barely) riff on this idea over the next few posts.
What is important at a poetry reading?
Is it the poem being read?
Is it the reading of the poem? Is it the poet, reading?
Is it the audience, listening (or not)?
Is it the other poets in the audience, the apostles of poetry, affirming or questioning the poetry of the poetry?
What other ways might we think of the people at the reading, besides their relationship and attitudes toward poetry? Especially when attitudes toward poetry seem by definition mercurial. On any given day, even many of the converted would admit: I, too, dislike it.
Or what of the non-poets or those dismissive of poetry - the unconverted - what of their approval or embarrassment?
How about the planners, the hosts, those who imagined and coaxed the event into being? The place? The time?
Take any one of these pieces away and the thing is changed. Imagine a poetry reading without a poem, or without a poet. A reading with no audience, or a different audience.
Imagine a reading that never comes to fruition, a reading that happens only in the imagination.
Imagine a poetry reading without tedium. Without the faithful. Without a desire to make a sacrament.
From Ch 5 of Against Ethics, p. 94:
Events are complex congolomerates and constellations of other events, and this without end, ad infinitum, without hope of reaching atomic simples. It would always be possible to vary one's perspective and hence to find new ways to think an event. That opens the door to a flood of new events. In this sense, there are no events, only interpretations.