In high school speech, Mr. Loy taught us not to read poetry,
but to perform it: the bigger our
flourishes, the better. A few years
later, in college, our creative writing professors told us that our words
should stand on their own. And true to
that, the graduate student poetry readings every other Thursday night might
have been classified as drone attacks—back when that word had a somniferous rather
than pugilistic meaning.
While styles of
reading are perhaps not quite as faddish as styles of shoes, they do come in
and out of favor. But even those who
are fans of unornamented reading, I think must have been carried away by
Veronica Patterson’s reading tonight at the Loveland Museum.
It is not that Patterson’s verse cannot speak
for itself, it certainly can, but the artifacts standing in the spotlight next
to her, the echoes of “glory” pinging through the audience, the second reader literally
embodying a second voice, the backdrop images of battlefield, buttons and sky, the musical prelude of Garryowen and the live rendition
of Taps by Gil Garcia, even the pause after the last poem and the first note of
that recessional—all were evocative of the Bighorn battlefield eulogized in Patterson’s
latest collection: Maneuvers.
These poems, which the poet admits are
departure from her typical subject matter, we can only hope are the first in more
collections this beloved Colorado poet might pen from the intersection of
historic events and her historical imagination, as she called it in her
introduction tonight. Because they, like
the performance tonight, are transformational.
The book, by the way, is available from Finishing Line Press.
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