BRATTLEBORO — These days poetry readings can be pretty dry affairs. Too often an author merely reads verse in front of a solemn and polite audience.
But that is not the way it has to be.
In the 1950s, beatniks gathered in coffeehouses to hear the latest would-be Ginsburg recite his poems accompanied by Miles Davis-styled jazz combos.
In the “happenings” of the 60s, poets could read amidst the unveiling of multi-media art installation.
On Feb. 13 and 14, at the Hooker-Dunham Theater in Brattleboro, a two-night benefit for Morningside Shelter is striving to make poetry readings rival the excitement of those events.
A new Brattleboro artists' collective called Vortex 2 will present Triskaidekaphobia Valentine's Day: two evenings of poetry, music, and art. Each night will feature a different show keyed to the symbolic importance of Friday the 13th and Valentine's Day respectively.
Poet MacLean “Mac” Gander got the idea for pairing the events because these two symbolic days were this year back-to-back.
He explains that triskaidekaphobia is when a person fears the number 13, a superstition that has its origins in the number of people at Christ's Last Supper. This year, Friday the 13th precedes Valentine's Day, the Saint's holiday most closely associated with love.
The two performances draw on themes of fear and love, and other opposites, mixing readings with music and projected artwork.
The centerpiece of both evenings will be two poets and Landmark College professors, Gander and John Rose, reading their poetry.
They will be accompanied by a jazz band featuring another Landmark instructor Charlie Schneeweis, with former Landmark student Jesse Whitehouse, who is the music director for the performances.
The show is directed by Ben Simon and produced by Omoefe Ogbeide, both current Landmark students.
Elizabeth Johnson, executive director of KidsPlayce in Brattleboro, is selecting the projected images to accompany the readings for each night's performance, as well as curating the accompanying Hooker-Dunham gallery art show tied to the event.
The exhibition will open on the Gallery Walk evening of Feb. 6 with a reception open to the public, where tickets to the performance will also be for sale.
All proceeds from the two-night performance event will benefit Morningside Shelter.
Founded in 1979, Morningside Shelter's mission is to provide a safe space and ongoing support to families and individuals facing challenges of maintaining stable housing in the Brattleboro area. But unlike most benefits which merely raise money for a worthy cause, Morningside Shelter will play a significant role in Triskaidekaphobia.
“Part of our show will spread the ideas behind Morningside,” says producer Ogbeide.
Gander initially conceived the ideas of the February event and Vortex 2, both of which have been collaboratively developed by many of the artists presenting Triskaidekaphobia.
“The benchmarks for our work on this event are the core themes that light and dark, good and evil, home and exile, love and fear can be reconciled in some temporary fashion,” says Gander. “We in Vortex 2 believe in the idea that art in the current period needs continually to be refreshed. Art should serve social justice; and art is made best when it engages multiple forms and works across different generations with our different knowledges of aesthetics and culture.”
At its essence, Vortex 2 is an artistic collective whose mission is “to bring together poetry, music, and art in integrated and improvisational ways to promote social justice by creating events that are aesthetically powerful, promote social change, and benefit local charities addressing poverty,” adds Gander.
Having lived in the Brattleboro area most of his life, Gander works at Landmark, where he was an administrator for two decades, including 11 years as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college.
In 2009, Gander returned to teaching at Landmark, partly in order to focus on creative work.
“I found it difficult to emphasize my poetry when I was an administrator,” he says. “I see the two roles somewhat opposed to each other.”
The son of Rod Gander, who was president of Marlboro College for 17 years and later served two terms as a state senator from Windham County, Mac Gander recently completed a book of poems called “Waiting for the Light,” a collection of his work to date, and he is now in the midst of a new work of lyrical memoir, a collection of short prose pieces tentatively called “Manhattan Babies Don't Sleep Tight.”
He will be reading selections from each of these works at Triskaidekaphobia Valentine's Day. Triskaidekaphobia will be Gander's first public reading in 30 years.
Gander will be accompanied by his colleague, John Rose, who has been published in numerous journals, including Old Crow Review, Jack Mackerel and Today's Poets. Rose was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For more than a decade, he has been working on a 1,000-page poem set on June 14, 1968, which he will be reading from at the Triskaidekaphobia Valentine's Day event.
Gander says, “I tell John that with a mammoth work like his, he is either one of the greatest poets of our generation, or completely mad. I'm banking on the former, and of course we won't know whether we were any good until at least a hundred years after we're dead.”
Gander says he greatly admires Rose's work.
“One reason I wanted to do this event in the first place is to get him out reading his poetry,” says Gander.
“John and I couldn't be more unlike. John is a dramatic poet who acts out the strange character he creates. In many ways his presentation is more like a performance piece than a traditional poetry reading. His poetry is brilliant and visionary, even psychedelic, while my work is more based on the relationship of psychology and culture, what Freud called metapsychology. Neither is typical of the standard fare of poetry being written these days.”
A participant on more than 30 recordings, Schneeweis has performed nationally and internationally. He is the winner of the “Talent From Towns Under 2000” contest on NPR's “Prairie Home Companion,” and has performed at Carnegie Hall as the lead trumpet in the Gene Pitney Band, and at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and with the “Rat Pack is Back” act in Las Vegas.
“One thing I do want to emphasize is that all of the principals - John, Charles, Elizabeth, and myself - are classically trained and steeped in our various traditions,” says Gander. “For instance beneath Rose's crazy seeming verse, he uses standard poetic forms like iambic meter and slant rhymes. If it seems dissonant, it is in the way, say, Bartok seems so. All of us certainly are trying to create something fresh and compelling, but also something that is really well-grounded and tight, not experimental for its own sake.”