Fun with Tin House

Book readings are rarely as much fun as they should be. All too
often, sitting in a room listening to an author read (or, worse, field
convoluted, self-important questions from the audience) is stuffy and
dull—like school, only for some reason you’re there voluntarily.
This weekend, Tin House teams up with Disjecta to offer something
beyond the “she talks, you sit quietly and listen” formula: a night of
music, booze, and readings from the winter issue of Tin House magazine, featuring contributors Arthur Bradford, author of
Dogwalker, and poet Matthew Dickman.

This event is noteworthy not only because you’ll be allowed some
actual fun with your reading, but because one of the readers is a local
who’s having a pretty damn good year. In addition to the American
Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Dickman’s 2008 collection
All-American Poem just won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a
$10,000 prize presented annually to a first book by a poet of “genuine
promise.” And no story about Dickman would be complete without noting
that he lives in Portland and works at Whole Foods.

Dickman’s poems are easy to read and easy to understand, but no less
expansive for their accessibility. All-American Poem unites an
acerbic eye toward contemporary America with a genuine interest in, and
empathy for, the people who populate that landscape. In nine ranging
pages, the book’s titular poem describes an America that’s
paradoxically both brimming with possibilities and hemmed in by the
insurmountable limitations of history, geography, and class. There are
lines that assert their own cleverness (“Times Square looks like
America throwing up on itself./I want to hold its hair back”).
Deceptively simple lines that unpack to contain entire lives. (“My
first girlfriend refused to eat meat./She said she wouldn’t be a tomb
for another living creature./But she privately cut herself on the
arms/which confused both her parents.”) And, modestly, lines that
acknowledge Dickman’s influences, and politely ask them to scoot over
and make some room—in the same long poem, poet Kenneth Koch walks
a dog through one of the narrator’s dreams.

Tonight offers a chance to acquaint yourself with some fine writers
while drinking booze and enjoying music from the Old Believers. I
suggest you take it.