My First Poetry Reading Review where I acted like a Journalist, sort of

I just came across this, something I turned in for a class, and think it is funny, and not to get all journal-y, but I think it is amusing to see where I used to be. Look how silly and grandiose I am! Invoking quantum physics! Look how much better (I think) my prose gets when I'm not consciously trying to be a reporter- did I lose something by thinking about careers? Am I now just trying to notice things that I'm supposed to notice, rather than the periodic table on the wall, and the voices wandering in from the hallway? Why can't poetry from my notes make it to the final draft?

My chronological observations on the poetry reading by Richard Kenny held in Remsen 101 on 11/10.
When I came in waiting for it to start:

Chalk boards & dust on everything
New projector system in old room
With gray-haired men and women
Courduroy and tweed
  -But the students
Young Bright
So awake at 6 pm
[When lectures at 9 kept them asleep]
Packing in requirements
Stadium space
Do we expect fresh
or quaint?
From this old man
Who gets titled
   poet.

So introduction and background info: University of Washington, MacArthur Fellow, author of 2008 The One Strand River. He starts to read.
    “We cringe in lemonade”- I like this description of an Indian summer.
    The idea of the next poem about the discovery of a 2nd moon we can't see is intriguing.
    “Shall I compare thee to appearances” is next, with a long back story of scene setting (Christmas) and how it is to look at Mt. Rainier through the mist before he reads, but I am so caught up in the title I am seeing roses on the mountain.
    He dedicates the next poem to his four-year-old daughter and I think he must not be so old after all...
    “These are endocrine poems, endocrine-based poems”, about lust and love says Kenny. I'm not sure about equating love to hormones and frankly am surprised a poet should describe it as such. But maybe he meant he is looking more deeply into the nuances of testosterone, estrogen, LH and FSH, progesterone, dihydrotestosterone and negative feedback loops... excuse me for being also in Reproductive Physiology right now and thinking of sex on the side, and it's chemicals, as I hear the cheers from the “One night stand” lecture in the room below us where some of my science professors are talking about it (I swear that's why, it's coming at me from all angles).
    On the poem “No” he says “I think this poem is funnier than anyone I've read it to,[pause] so I'm going to try it on you”. I sit bemused, and also trying to unravel that a bit. At the end, no one laughs. Conclusion, Mr. Kenny?
    He speaks science-y which is perhaps an interesting way for him to think but sometimes seems like a little slight of hand to get us to buy his perspectives, though I don't really think he's trying to pull one over on us, it's just his character. He's getting to some section and says it is “reflections on evolutionary psychology”.
    The poem “Constitution” I really like. I can see the images, walking the dog with hot coffee spilling on the sleeve, and a cat licking its left paw under the left tire of a car, and the rest of the neighborhood. I saw myself walking Avi's dogs in his neighborhood outside Manhattan, complete with the broker's Benz on the block. (Was it ironic that Constitution is also a street name in the real neighborhood? Interesting how little things set us off, but then still connect so well- he described a neighborhood I knew from a coast away, by chance).
    “Oh wouldn't it be grand if there weren't too many people in the world, and I was one of them” is the excellent last line of his poem “Millenial” about wishes for the future based on our millenial fears- we get all caught up in these Utopic views of plenty of food and electric cars etc. and then the last line takes us back to the world. Yeah that's nice and all, but here we are (all going-on-7- billion of us).
    Ah! He made a rhyme in pig latin? I missed it.
    The poem “Final Exam” all about aging and facing the future (I'm supposing from the exam-giver's view) also ends well, thought provoking: “Here's a short quiz: Who's dead? Good. Now put your pencil down”.
    He speaks about the guy who made up pro/con lists and in the next poem there is a reference. He reads: (make the list and then) “In next life, do it in pros” but I heard “do it in prose”. Both are nice, I think. I like when gems fall out from hearing rather than reading- all art has to do with the experience.
    “Some day I'm going to write more about the world's first flowering plants...” he trails. His speaking is kind of jumbled, but it's amusing.
    And another long preface to a poem, he keeps repeating “What you need to know is...” and I wonder how anyone is supposed to read this book without him as a guide. Are there footnotes? How much changes when you don't know?
    glazed
    engaged
    disengaged
    lulled by rhythm
    throw in a rhyme to wake me up?
    start speaking Spanish?
    “He she they... primal soup... Mercedez Benz” I imagine Kenny likes Scrabble, Natural History Museums, bookstore coffee shops and nice Italian dinners out in couples.
    The periodic table on the wall has H both above Li and next to He (ie. on the left and right. It's usually either or, but both are correct). I start to read my trusty alphabet:
    He Li Beneath a sheet
    opaque
    Hidden in words, But we
    can see his shape through
    the sheet, anyway so,
    really,
    nothing is revealed.

    What's in between the elements or what are they attempting by being quantum? Even light is really quantum-right? But electrons stream continuously in space (Kenny pointed me here, indirectly, with all this science vocab and when he quickly explained a galvanization reaction. It was easy to shift my eyes forty degrees and arrive at the elements on the wall). But then as it turned out, he was about to get there anyway.
    “Dark matter” is the poem he's on. He's talking beforehand (and then in the poem) about fire and light and waves and quetzoquotal and musing that we are asked to believe so many things.Like really (I am thinking), poems are extensions of thought thoughts. Philosophies, up for editing.
    “Hydrology lacrymation”, a poem about a river. (Wetness sobbing, as he translates though I would translate: Watery Tears). He says in the first line “The river meanders because it can't think”. Does it? I didn't listen to the rest because I'm stuck on this, I don't agree. But I'm contemplating. This is where as a reader I'd be able to collect it maybe, but I'm a listener- so be it.
    My final thought as he finished up was that so many of these poems- almost all of them- have a purpose, a back story. Some have so much explanation. The overall Richard Kenny impression, then, was Science-y poet with deep desires, or poetry with complicated layers. Sort of Dali- modern but with overarching purpose beyond the abstract.