This is how things happen: First, author Sarah Monette mentions a LiveJournal that posts a poem every Monday.
I follow this link and make a note to come back later and look for poets I am not familiar with.
And as I start looking over the list the first thing that grabs me is a post of Thylias Moss’s poem Tornadoes. I find the poem fascinating, but even more so for the allusion to Moss being a good reader:
A lot of poets don’t read their own work well. Thylias Moss is not among them. I once went to a reading of hers, years ago now, and she was amazing.
I’m fascinated with the notion of good readers–the spread for readers of fiction from the amazing to the intolerable is shocking, and for poets the very nature of poetry throws this spectrum into a harsher relief.
Sometimes readers can take good works and move them to a whole other level (Nicole Blackman springs to mind–her poems take a quantum leap when you hear them read by her), and sometimes a poor reader can completely remove everything sublime from a brilliant work.
So now I want to find out more about Thylias Moss, and I want to hear her read, to see if I agree with the above assessment.
Well, in the Internet age, finding out more about her is no problem.
A quick Googling pulls up the basic facts–her history, her backstory, her job, her MacArthur genius grant(!), and so on.
It also pulls up an MP3 of her reading a bit from her poem “The Rapture of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin as the Moment of the Soul’s Apotheosis“. That addresses the second point fairly well–I think it pretty much demonstrates the whole “not a boring reader” concept.
(It also pulls up at least one other MP3 sample of her reading.)
While digging around I also found The Culture Of Glass, which I quite like.
The future of fortunes is manufactured revelation
of a snow globe: when the right someone gets his hands
on such a world, that world is shaken to pieces
I found Charles Simic blurbing her as:
Moss is a visionary storyteller, a political and religious poet. It’s the world of ‘marvelous thirsts’ and ‘glorious hungers’, to use her words. I don’t know many poets who have better eyes and better ears. She knows that language is both the individual and the community. She has a sense of history, the complexity and variety of Black experience in America. What drama, humor, imagination, intelligence and range of subject matter these poems have!….Thylias Moss is already a major figure in contemporary American poetry.
This entire quote included just for Gwenda and her Simic-crush.
(That’s from a paper on Moss.)
I found a couple of her blogs, which I will have to explore later. Looks like lots of fun, tongue-in-cheek artsy stuff in there.
And I found that she’s doing some other stuff now, or at least she was in 2006:
Acclaimed U-M professor Thylias Moss probably wouldn’t want to be called “poet” anymore. Though her writing has won almost every major poetry award, Moss has been busy blowing out the definitions of what makes for art and poetry. These days, she’s producing dynamic multi-media artwork that unites words, music, and video, like “Pleasurable Complexity” which you can see here.
(Here’s the link to the video–it’s m4v: Pleasureable Complexity. It’s not what you would expect after hearing the reading above.)
So that’s quite a few lines of exploration growing out of a single offhand mention.
But we’re not done. The trails I was following lead to a couple of very cool things, and as a reward for reading all the way down to here I shall tell you about them.
First, my surfing also turned up the fact that Moss was one of the readers for the Library of America’s Republic of Verse marathon reading.
So suddenly I’ve got MP3s of around a score of modern readers attempting to do justice to about six hours worth of the best American poetry from the 19th century. Damn. I’m kind of a fan of Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, and Holmes
(Incidentally, this is how I like to run into recordings–nicely arranged with extensive notes. Yay, Library of America!)
Not done yet, though. On another part of my surfing journey I ran across the U Mich Department of English Media archive.
And guess what’s the latest thing there, nicely featured at the top of the page: Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) giving this year’s Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture/Reading.
Here’s the writeup:
The second annual Sarah Marwil Lamstein Childeren’s Literature Lecture featured Daniel Handler. Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth and Adverbs, and serves as the legal, literary and social representative of Lemony Snicket, whose sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series Of Unfortunate Events, have allegedly sold more than 56 million copies in 39 languages and are indirectly responsible for at least one major motion picture. For reasons unknown even to himself, he works intermittently in film, journalism and music, including a collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony entitled The Composer Is Dead. The adjunct accordionist for the pop group The Magnetic Fields, Mr. Handler lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, and a relatively small child.
I can’t get the video to work–I suspect a broken link, but you can grab the audio of the lecture.
And that’s probably enough to both entertain you, and illustrate some kind of a point about how the web rewards interest with serendipity or something.
