St Marks Reading - Review by Rachel Cee

I went to the reading at St Marks monday and caught Ronaldo Wilson, an internet opera composer, and Mendi and Keith Obadike, a couple who works at Columbia in the black music archive department. The whole reading was amazing and I consider it to be the one I have most enjoyed at St Mark’s so far.

The introduction given for Ronaldo was about operatic mode as a filter and to think through the following readings and our current world. The mc for the night asked us to consider how it “sheltered parts of space” and how that related to us. What Ronaldo expects from opera is aesthetic pleasure in it’s true state. The guy who runs the Poetry Project Monday’s then went on to talk about the body and dialectics and what happens in both realms when these tend to disappear, that what’s dead is dead.

When Ronaldo hit the stage and spoke his poetry was mostly about homosexual sex as he is a queer male poet. He read about different lovers and he said that his introduction had been “all right on, all that stuff about friendship was right on.” Ronaldo read until “language wrecks itself” but it hadn’t, the listener just hoped the tongue bath their eardrums had just received was about to their physical body.

Mendi and Keith’s installation work was very different, the tone was spiritual and almost religious, but both artists works related to freedom and struggle. I felt that Mendi and Keith’s works often referenced numerology and voodoo and were absolutely stunning. Should I have had more time to study the works before this review I can only imagine the enormous amount of facts or innuendo woven throughout. An installation piece with a 200 hour house song as the centerpiece needs a great deal of material to build on to exist. These amazing artists touched me with their narrative poem about the ogre, who brought an army back to life as zombies and hammered their hands to the size of “cold blue mountains” to block out the light of the moon to continue to torture the towns people. They asked the question, “One hundred years from now who will be talking about the struggle?” The artists ended on the note of wondering how long we would all still be fighting for freedom.

I could not have imagined a better reading to be at to have the questions posed seriously in such a compelling yet comforting manner. Selfish feelings of a wish to end all struggle and be free rose up inside me and I almost cried during the ogre poem. I was very awkward when I asked the artists if I could take their portraits for my poets and publishers, people final project. They all agreed and were so wonderful I had such a nice time meeting them. Ronaldo was my first person to really pose and I hope these portraits turn out really well, just like the rest of the evening.