Utterly stunning reading last night by Gabriella Torres and Sara Veglahn. This was my favorite kind of work: poems that simultaneously plumb the linguistic AND emotional possibilities of poetry. Enough formal and stylistic chops to keep the pedantic virtuouso ear happy but at root good old blood and guts. The haunted academy, as it were.

Torres's poems are elegant, artfully designed, full of pathos and in stretches sexy. Sort of like if the Vadim/Malle/Fellini Edgar Allen Poe pastiche film "Spirits of the Dead" with Brigitte Bardot had been filmed in the 19th century with a cast of decorated Maori, instead of the 70's. In case that metaphor is not clear, a few lines from "Homesong"

"and in the carosels, and in all the chasing hounds.
Since you've been gone, I have rarely seen an animal

as delicate, or an hour as tight, as our bones.
The winter is wintering. We are entering

the second stage of this economics where
lanscapes shift as restlessly as a paper dress,"

A kind of funhouse symbolist narrative with crackly echoes, as delicious as (not from the reading but something I found online here):

"To my chimera,

Your favorite place to sit is on my shoulders. You like to chase your tail on my back."

If I were the sort to compile hierarchical lists of work that I find to be engaging and exciting, Sara Veglahn's work would come pretty close to the top of it. I'm not that sort, but you get my drift. Her poems are expertly paced, overwhelming the reader in a wave of musical language, but relentlessly keeping to their emotional agenda with a brutal precision. Her poems take themselves apart explicitly and rebuild themselves in a kind of slow-motion foment. Like one of those Hokusai prints.

Unfortunately I was too blown away to take any notes, so I can't quote particular lines from last night, but I can quote Sara's brilliant chapbook "Falling Forward" from Braincase Press, one of my favorite acquisitions from the past year or so.

"It would be a different story if the facts were different. Days turned in on themselves. A factored sense of movement. Her heart hurt from all the details. Moving in a straight line is not her forte. In Italian, she means to be louder. To be heard among the din.

Glowing orange balls float and roll over her bed. She wants them off so she pushes them off."

and

"...Almost always nearly descending, she is and was going to, standing as in panic.

Something is turning is calling is landing."

"Falling Forward" being a pose narrative of a sort does not thus give a sense of the rythms of her verse poems, but the timbre is the same, a kind of barren phantasmagoria.

Both these poets impress me with their unflinching embrace of emotional mimesis without succumbing to the pull of conventional narrative or familiar language. I remember remarking to myself that both poets employed hyperbolic expressions deftly (""When you come back I will eat all the roses again and again," from Torres's "Love Poem"), something which I often find missing from other contemporary work which seems more concerned with coy aphorisms and ironic slapstick. To me, the most exciting terrain stretching out before writers of my generation, equipped with the tools of the Beats, the New York School and the Language movement is a kind of semantic emptiness which explores the surface potential of pure language while still invoking the Romantic and humanist agenda of dissecting human emotion and the narrative of the self, be it conscious or subconscious. A kind of chimera, in fact, or to employ a purely Romantic metaphor, a kind of Frankenstein; animate beings comprised of variously conjoined dead parts. A kind of reanimation, a corpse poetics, to steal a phrase from Eileen Tabios, though I mean literal corpses (literal literal corpses) as opposed to Savasana. Or a kind of Revenant Poetics, as it were, to steal a phrase from myself. I know I get like a broken record with my undead metaphors. But I will ride my dead horse.

Anyway, kudos to both Torres and Veglahn and one should check out their work if one has not...