Inevitable: Bill Luoma is rather deadpan in his delivery while Anne Tardos is irreverent in hers.
Evitable: Bill Luoma takes us down to Oakland in the middle of 2012’s uprising and General Strike. He then shifts to an ethereal realm in his sound poems from his book Some Math (Published September 1st, 2011 by Kenning Editions). These sound poems possess the ear with their nonsensical, acupuncture jargon word pairings and resonant rhythms that are steeped in the same immediacy as his more openly political work.
Inevitable: Anne Tardos flows to a peak only to flow again; while Luoma drives like his partner is in labor but he doesn’t want a speeding ticket.
Evitable: Anne Tardos takes us to Europe especially Italy in her irreverent poems based in both crime novel parlance and GPS directions. She read from an unpublished body of work that she tentatively titled Power of 3. Explaining that she based her poetic decisions on lines whose word counts were divisible by three. Much of her work seemed to be a defiant challenge surrounded by lamentations.
Inevitable: Luoma and Tardos both have political sensibilities that are well crafted into their more opaque works.
Evitable: From Oakland where we are listening to the language of activism and police brutality to France and Hungary where we are exposed momentarily to the language of denial and lamentation. “I have no time to write/ That I have no time to write,” quips Tardos. “Sorry to hear about your run-in with the state,” deadpans Luoma. The contrast is narrow. The poetics of these two poets are more in sync than could’ve been stated at first hearing those lines. Both elevating quotidian found language (acupuntural in Luoma’s case and navigational in Tardos’s). Everything is different on the page.
Favorite Lines:
“...All painted Cops are very unhappy...” ~Bill Luoma
“...The importance of escaping/ Has not escaped me…” ~Anne Tardos
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