Reading Poetry in Paris
Posts during July will be few and far between as I am spending the month in Paris and am frantically trying to get all of it into four short weeks; I know it sounds like a long vacation, but there are so many smaller great museums and restaurants, and am also planning a drive North to Mont St. Michel and St. Malo.
More importantly, last night I got to read some of my poetry in an English-language poetry club called Chat Noir; seems there are such English poetry clubs in very many countries. This club is much like the old Cantab Lounge in Central Square, Cambridge– at least before a friend of mine purchased and rehabbed that venue. A dive bar upstairs, a dank cellar for reading poetry. Chat Noir has poetry readings every Monday night from 8:45 to midnight (a couple of breaks) and last night there were readers from the US, Britain, Canada, France and Mali.
The poetry was mixed, as could be expected, with far more emphasis on rhymed poetry than one finds at US readings. And as a footnote: the Paris scene is not full of masks, perhaps why the COVID threat here is so high. In the crowded bar and basement, we saw exactly one other person with a mask. The bar was open to the street so small risk there. The basement was, well, a basement….
I read a long poem from my book Laertes in America, a poem about how time folds itself around so that the past, present and future all abut in reality, memory and concepts of the future. I think it seemed a bit avant-garde for this particular audience, which seemed strange for Paris; I sensed that there was a bit of confusion with the lines:
“Helen of Troy lies down with Tiny Tim/while her towers burn in a different crevice.”
And I am quite sure they missed two references to famous science fiction stories: one about not stepping on the butterfly and another about not confronting elephants. How about you? Ten points for each correct identification of these references at [email protected].
If I have time I will post more from here but in the meanwhile, a bientot.
About The Author
Stephen Honig
Stephen Honig has been writing fiction and poetry all his life. The sources of his writings are of course his life experiences: growing up in ethnic New York City; attendance at two alleged bastions of Ivy League erudition; a long career in the law with its attendant exposures to people, business and technology; reading everything eclectic along with alleged classics of the Western canon; wide travel including a gig in the USSR in the ‘70s to bring legal briefs to refuseniks; teaching at three colleges and at a law school in Russia; raising two families in very different generations. Now, Honig has completed his first novel, Event, a thriller combining the international espionage style of John Le Carre with the gripping pace of novels by James Patterson. If you’d like to sign up to automatically receive my blog posts, please go to the Contact page and submit the form. Thank you!