Saturday, July 24 at Plummer Park, the Lesbian Reading Series sponsored by A Different Light Bookstore features New York writer Eileen Myles, who does the unusual and memorable feat of reciting from memory the first four or five pages of a personal essay entitled, "My Father's Alcoholism." In cut-offs and T-shirt, Myles the incurable tomboy looks us in the eye and tells us her story, sentence after preformed sentence. Sometimes, not often, she falters, then remembers. The essay, remarkable for evoking the horrors and horrific amusements of an alcoholic household, has a strong voice. It is Myles' voice, but it is her writer's voice, definitely more shaped and modulated than the improvisation of daily speech. Suddenly he was roaring drunk. He was white. He was red. Myles' recitation, neither performance nor acting, kicks up questions: Does memorizing lend more immediacy to the hearing of the work? Should memory, shaped into prose, be re-memorized?
Eventually, Myles picks up the book and begins to read: "I only memorized so far," she says cheerfully. I, for one, am relieved to have the old familiar page conventionally lodged between reader and audience.
Sunday, July 31 is clear and hot, a good day to drive to the Ballona Wetlands to hear a reading in the Lannan Foundation's poetry garden. Today's readers are winners in the 1994 National Poetry Series contest. Founded in 1978 by poet Daniel Halpern with seed money from novelist James Michener, the Series asks five established poets to select five less-established poets for the award. Through a Lannan Foundation grant, publishers are found for the winners' books, winners receive a cash award equivalent to a small royalty advance, and are flown to Los Angeles for the reading we've come to hear. The program is varied. Traditional formal concerns seem paramount, although political and moral issues seep in, along with a universal fondness for the ironic and the arcane.
