May 4, 2004 “Introduction” to Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman Live at Penny Lane 1989″

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In 1989, Eleni Sikelianos, then a poetics student at Naropa Institute, created the Student Union for Ethnic Inclusion (SUEI), an organization whose purpose was to raise funds to provide scholarships in order to broaden the ethnic diversity at Naropa. She was also a vocal and popular activist for greater recognition and respect for the school’s female students, who too often felt underappreciated and marginalized by the powerful male members of the teaching staff. So it’s not surprising that this reading, which was organized as a fundraiser for SUEI, featured two of the most powerful female voices teaching at Naropa during the winter of 1989.

It’s also not surprising that this reading was presented at the Penny Lane Coffee House by Tom Peters, whose Monday Night Poetry Series has been an institution in Boulder since 1983, and continues even today. In 1989, these readings were held at the original location of Penny Lane, which was directly across the street from its current location on the corner of 18^th and Pearl Streets. The original Penny Lane had two rooms—a room facing 18^th Street in front of the main counter where people sat for coffee and pastries, and a smallish shotgun room whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out upon Pearl Street.

At “big-name” events like this, the room filled up quickly. The amount of money raised—several hundred dollars at a time when margueritas were $1.50—testify to how crowded the room was. There were a couple of round tables and maybe 30 chairs, and late arrivals had to make their way through the crowd to stand at the back of the room or sat on the floor at the feet of the readers. In those days there was no sound system and the poets had to enunciate clearly and more or less shout in order to be heard above the crowd. On this December night—my journals tell me it was December 4, 1989—the room was stiflingly hot and dry, and cigarette smoke hung over our heads and stung my lungs in the small, airless room. Looking over the audience that night, one saw many of the best poets in Boulder and almost the entire student body of Naropa.

At this point, Bernadette and Anne’s friendship had spanned over 25 years—significantly more than half of their lives—and there’s obvious sparks flashing between them; not exactly a competitive spirit, but more as if they’re reading to inform and impress each other with their latest work.

In this case, Bernadette brought her recent collection of translations and imitations of (mostly) the Roman poets Catullus and Horace, published as The Formal Field of Kissing. The title of her collection acknowledges her interest—shared with another master translator of Catullus, Louis Zukofsky—for the electricity generated by salacious content written with a passionate frankness in colloquial language within expressly formal structures. What the slightness of her voice and the ease and humor of her presentation belies (including her introduction to her reading, which is “I’m going to read some dirty poems”) is the immense erudition and skill and effort she has brought to the task.

Then, following the performance of a “collaboration” between the two poets, we are treated to one of Anne’s more intimate performances. Reading without a sound system literally in the middle of the audience, with her young son playing at her feet, she is in full Madonna mode—her voice succulent and fecund, her presence (as I remember it) slender, flaming, and red.

The iconoclastic political interests and dense collage of information, facts, and quotations are hallmarks of any point in her career, but in a planned or spontaneously chosen harmony with Bernadette’s reading, Anne focuses here on poems celebrating her lineage (including an extended homage to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady), translations from ancient texts (in this case, from the Sanskrit), some love poems, and a healthy dose of darkly frank sexuality. But what moved me most was her reading from “Iovis,” where her lines rise with a lyricism that could easily be scored. By the time she’s through, she has, as she puts it in one of her lines from “Iovis,” presented “the entire language of you and your audience.”

This recording was made in the days when the Boulder poetic community had an intensity and liveliness that didn’t need a stage or a sound system, but was something to be discovered and celebrated in the moment, a living thing, driven by love and blood and breath. And on this night of poetry whispered and sung among the gathered awareness of the crowd, the audience was an integral part of the event, breathing along with the poets.