Joseph Harrington Poetry Reading

history becomes fate when

it's over with

no more disjunct

than this world

A gateway timeout occurred

The server / is unreachable

History abounds 

a keeling curve

this starts to be how it gets

to keening

love filters : red void

Molly's mussels live-o

while she dies-o

that's the point, see?

A space

is a character too

One remembers that, if not what

The space is more historical

than the stars

From Joseph Harrington's book, "Things Come On: (an amneoir)". Harrington read poems mostly from this book, which links the death of his mother, taken by cancer, to the Watergate scandal.

"Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet’s mother’s illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies—showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting “amneoir” (a blend of “memoir” and “amnesia”) explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence—not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history." (Wesleyan University Press)

We all really enjoyed Harrington's reading, his story, his style. He was intertwining these two events that were happening simultaneously in his life as a young boy, gathering what little he actually remembered, memories with his mother, and the later received realization of certain themes that linked these two tragic events, documentation, research, a collage of artifacts, memories and ideas... a story told by Harrington. His reading did seem a little distant. And why wouldn't it? He was only ten years old. The emotion didn't come from his remembrance, but from another place. I think it came from the not-remembering... the distance. It is a part of his history, but yet, a part of our nation's history. I even found myself snickering in moments of tragedy because of the way he read it, and then I realized, this is actually extremely sad. It was an emotional movement through and around the ups and downs of life. It was a mystery, something Harrington was figuring out and discovering, and the emotions reflected just that. You can see a video of his reading at the MAE Poetry Series Website.