WARNING: High Altitude Reading May Cause Feelings of Elatedness
by Colie Collen
The air in Boulder is thin; the town, you see, is a mile in the air. This can (and does) lead to: feelings of lightheaded ease,spontaneous over-caffeination, and the gathering of fabulous poet-communities. So many writers and otherwise far-out persons live and teach and study in the area that it seems they drive the clouds away — 300 days of sun a year!? Friday night (March 14) was a veritable smorgasbord of Fence, and as Fence is itself a smorgasbord, you can only imagine our delight. The readers: Tina Celona, whose new prose poems are a testament toher line, “when my writing goes well I attribute it to God”; Kaisa (rhymes with Rice-a) Ulsvik Miller, winner of the 2007 Motherwell Prize for the new release Unspoiled Air, who voiced her scrambled syntax in melodic tones, echoing the room’s general sentiment, “we is doing what we love”; Chelsey Minnis, her work always spot-on enough forthe cringe/giggle/emphatic nod reaction, read a series of untitled poems, a list of titles, and from the prefaces to Bad Bad; Elizabeth Robinson, at the halfway-in mark, read her Ars Poetica, “grant[ing] the interchangeable quality of beginning and ending”; Sasha Steensen, reading from The Method(forthcoming from Fence this spring) and A Magic Book,taunted all nay-sayers with perfectly (in)complete sentences;Catherine Wagner, singing and kissing and blasting her way through a “series about fucking” (which means it’s really about everything). This from her new chapbook, Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha Press); and Rebecca Wolff, who closed the night with a series about recognizing knowledge in its simplest forms. “I guess I never thought much about baking cookies / Well think about it”. The read-to left the room with contented smiles or lingered with the same. The night was balmy, to us Albanians. We ate chocolate and overslept. What more can a girl ask for?