READING IN DOMUS ANGELORUM
Fandel, John
Reading in Domus Ungelorum JOHN FANDEL It had been so long since I had given a reading, I wondered, when the invitation came, if I still could, feeling, as I hadn't for nearly as long, I'd like...
...There's a Nursery Rime akin to all this, and a NT parable...
...I said yes, to myself, I would...
...Then a voice proved there was a night ahead of us...
...window...
...Gingerly, then scurrying...
...How could I say: Reality, seen, is always better than a poem about reality, when I had a fleeting realization of what that meant if one were looking on Hell, the real thing, not just Dante's or only Milton's...
...An advent of Angels...
...So I said, explaining, sometimes for always...
...1950, I'd had a freakish labyrinthine streak of poet's luck amazing, but not meteoric and pleasure, reading to four, four hundred, a few more or less . . . not counting the afternoon I read new poems to Marie in an upland meadow...
...Someone on the roof...
...I wish I had ad-libbed "or a Divine Comedy...
...It leads to another and one more...
...The fee was fine...
...I did not write yes, on the spot...
...On the side of the angels, I applaud them...
...Still, there are places that require a resurveying of the concept, Heaven...
...Not for any reason of dickering or playing hard-to-get...
...Not a stable, actually, it had been a carriage house, Victorian, refitted by Dominican Sisters into a cameo theatre, a beauty, paneled, the wood mellowed as by eons of dawn...
...The silence they had so religiously kept continued...
...I'm partial to the empyrean...
...That sound, too, the silent listeners surely have heard, punctuating iambics...
...The company I kept was not, however, on a "circuit" I hear of fellow craftsmen, from time to time, having read on this or that "circuit," as if they were curiously wired or somehow more than just usually connected...
...Local roof-climbing kids shooed away, I finish the poem...
...Where the poet reads, some believe, does not matter, a coffee house as good as a dell on Parnassus, a dive...
...I supposed the evening was over...
...Before hearing them, you are simply the poet observed, looked at, a voice in a deafening silence, a voice heard by itself selfconsciously wondering how others are hearing it...
...I had frequently read for much less, for ten bucks, for the love of it, for Lapsang Souchong and Oreos for JOHN fandel, Commonweal...
...I've heard of the fees Big Names get, fees fat enough to choke a horse...
...Poets of the World, Unite" has never been my motto...
...I had read once, as I said, in a meadow, I had also read in a barn, a lounge, an auditorium, a church, a hall, a classroom, a laboratory, a West-Side apartment living room, a Park Avenue den...
...As it turned out, I read in a former stable, proper stamping ground for Himself...
...The reading has rounded itself out, is over...
...After all their patience and sensitive reception and response, the listeners applaud me...
...Few, but fit...
...Pegasus landing...
...What they heard drifts back in their response, their reaction so generous, their friendliness coming through...
...Angel in the wings...
...And then, half-way through the second reading, sounds over-head...
...poems, sometimes, a way of seeing...
...clock...
...Still, seeing the real Domus Angelorum is better than a blueprint poem...
...There was a time, I understand, when poets even resorted to having patrons no petty entrepreneurs declaiming at the whiff of a sandwiched-copper dime...
...I could ask them to speak up, question, comment...
...Maybe the place made me say . . . but no: I knew what I was going to say before I walked into Domus An-gelorum inscribed over the lintel, as nifty a kenning for heaven since English verse was alliterative accentual...
...The night is turning colder...
...In a House of Angels, one can hardly be apodictic...
...poetry editor, teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...I meant all the overtones...
...A good thing they were few...
...A window...
...Your Bull's Eye pocket watch on the lectern ticks suddenly louder...
...By then, my time was up it was time to listen to my listeners for a while...
...Reading in Domus Ungelorum JOHN FANDEL It had been so long since I had given a reading, I wondered, when the invitation came, if I still could, feeling, as I hadn't for nearly as long, I'd like to, once more...
...I also said and meant: Poetry is a way of looking...
...nothing at all...
...I don't support the growing Trade Unions turning poets into petit four winners, or larger egos than most humdrum talents can support...
...I worked "looking" through to poetry as the awareness of being looked at, and "seeing," finally, to "reflection" of several kinds...
...They lead to more comments until, certain, I know the time has come for one last poem...
...Yet I heard myself revising insights arrived at on more native grounds...
...You wonder how you are going over, until, happily lost in the poetry, you wonder only about the poems, your wonder becoming partly vocal...
...The drift of a curtain in the room catches your eye...
...my angelic audience nodded, bright-eyed, wide-awake...
...I did say, not a word changed, however: Life is better than an Odyssey or a Paradise Lost...
...Department Chairman and Dean go out to investigate (I stopped midway through a poem) while the rest of us wait, chatting about spooks, specters, spirits...
...From the first, ca...
...I had read to fifth-graders and luncheon ladies and embryonic Byrons and pre- & post-Vatican II nuns and Ph.D.'s and alumni and literary societies, et al...
...Looking" and "seeing," the images I played on for insights, led into the poems I read, eye poems, in either sense...
...A noise from a side room distracts you, momentarily, a rattleelick coming from radiator...
...It fades away...
...Not that readings in the past hadn't gone over...
...The spectrum, here and there, at one time or another, may not be Aurora Borealis, if more syllabic than Roy G. Biv...
...When you listen to your hearers, you begin to catch an echo of what you sounded like to them...
...In responding to their responding, I gave a second reading, as long as the first, and better my best...
...Never had I read in a simulacrum of paradise...
...to hear them read is to believe they themselves swallow what was intended only for Pegasus...
Vol. 103 • August 1976 • No. 17
