Death of an Anthology: A Postmortem of the Outside Voices NYC "Launch" Reading

let me say straight out, the reading was good. a bit low key, perhaps, but not awkward, or at least i didn't sense it to be so. and given that it was a reading for an anthology that was two years in the making and had been killed the day before the reading, it certainly could have been a very awkward event.

the main point, though, is that the readers were all interesting. i was especially moved by the work of j.s. makkos. he read/performed a poem that was a dialogue between a man and woman that very much had the feel of something out of the French new wave cinema, and also made fascinating use of the idea of the audience as eavesdroppers and the poet as translator and narrator of multiple voices.

jessica hinted that she was negotiating with a few other presses that were interested in putting out the anthology and that it may not be totally dead. her main point, though, was that the anthology as a project, the ghost of a material object, served a good purpose in that it brought young poets together.

so, basically, the reading was chill, pretty anti-climatic given its context.