review of a poetry show

Trial By Lantern

"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time." -Lady Gaga

Fat Tuesday was the date. 8pm was the time and Espresso Art café on University blvd was the place for the trial II performance by Lantern. Lantern is a poetry troop of 3 college students. The evening exceeded any expectations one might have upon hearing “poetry reading.” The words they read slowly dug a hole to get to art, the words exposed movies and songs and images and memories of the diversity that is Lantern. Lantern is comprised of Alan Tanz with his innovative and forgotten places of the imagination, Kat LaRue with her 50’s, love struck style, and Lindsay Janes’s modest, unraveling notions of provocativeness. The environment was warm and inviting. They were not performing in glass cases marked “do not touch” instead the night seemed impromptu. A touch the poets added to their evening was a confession booth. Each poet told a story about themselves that they have not told anyone, that is always in the background of their mind and if thought about change who they are. Funny and disgusting, insightful, and moving the line between performer and observer were erased to only sense a cloud of a line.

Kat began the evening. Miss LaRue uses words as freely as we use salt, on everything, in everything, adding a pinch here and there, to taste. She disguised the idea of lust with phrases like “Christmas tree limbs,” “Toilet paper angels and desire,” “Rearrange our crooked features into a Picasso grace,” “Finger set to vicious.” Like salt to a dish, she provides a need for words but somehow never adds too much, her poems are never too salty. Next Lindsay took it away.

Lindsay’s poem, Ode To Karen Barbee “belly dance extraordinaire” slithered off her tongue in a melodic dancelike way. Like the hips of a belly dancer she twisted and shook words together until the realization of the poem took shape. The things that live within both the dancer and speaker and what the speaker wants and knows was the resounding effect. The words- “Offering a moment I could cradle,” “You are old and you never wanted to be,” “I keep my garish extremities to myself,” “I was pieced together in you” -are mesmerizing lyrics to the song of a dancer.

Attention was then turned to Alan who was putting on music and stood in the center of the “stage.” A rat living in the dark corner of a bedroom who gets fed and bites is the plot of his poem. The subject, however, is unaware greediness, silence that is frustrating and powerful, power transfer until this thing, this rat has all of it. Angering silence and accepting offers of cheese it is able to give the speaker such fuel as to rip the floor boards off. Alan performed his words, paying equal attention to the diction as well as the way he says them. By taking a phrase like “dark corner” and taking a breathe between the words he has transformed soundless text into a story, an unveiling of music, of rage, and beauty.

Turkish music, soft at first then faster and deeper was white canvas on which he performed his poem. Kat and Lindsay played backup roles, softly accompanying Alan in a few chosen words, “dark loner”, “never a rat at all”, “come here Sofje”, “dark abyss”, “reach out”, “trap her”, “feed her”, “sofje”, “rat”, “rat”, “sofje”, “rat.” It was a theatrical experience that left the small audience speech less.

Towards the end the trio performed a poem together. Each adding a phrase, one after the other. It was called “Galapagos.” And with that they talked of being uniquely one of a kind and uniquely special.

After the deep breath of the show and the filled with unorganized knotted stomachs, the evening ended with a song by Lady Gaga and the poets dancing around as if we were not there, as if celebrating the shape of the space of their minds.