Greatest Living Poet

* You can tell what kind of poetry reading you're at by the response of an audience. Open mic slammers clap between every poem. Academic readings are deadly quiet, least you miss a semi-colon emoted from Seamus. Experimental poets smoke weed in the front row of their readings. It just depends. There's the heckling school, great when it's done well and lousy when it's not. But I write today in praise of that poetic hmmmmmm, given after a particularly piquant final line, a sort of tangible essence on the air as if someone was cooking turkey at the reading (and wouldn't that be something if they were?). It rises in the throats, requires a finger up across the considering jaw, and when done correctly gives everyone in the room a shiny feeling in their thorax that lasts a minute. Kind of the way some record store employees will clap furiously when they recognize a song that the band is playing 5 bars into what they're playing. That's "Jane of the Waking Universe!" they think to themselves. And they let the band know, secret Book House Boys eyebrow rub style. Clap clap clap!

I gave the hmmmmm a try over at Jordan Davis' latest reading. An audience should exhale at the end of every poem, it seems to me. Like an Austrian tennis pro slapping the ball back to the reader. Podiums can feel as lonely as bus stations, and there ought to be some way to let the readers know they have *changed* us. Barring indoor pyrotechnics, I believe by claiming the poetic hmmmmm, this can be accomplished.

Try it at home and see what you think. Read this poem aloud to yourself and then let a hmmmm sound rise from your throat (slowly, slowly, let it build):

Beefy Forgiveness

My brothers thought it might turn
Into a teradachtyl instead of a butterfly.

Poop across windshield makes a dusk
The corn inside of which refuses to pop.

Everyone's already slept with the groom.
We killed the leprechaun for his sugary breakfast cereal.

Marshmallows in wheelbarrows, the tongue
Is the tastiest meat. I lie in a field of wolftraps,

Sonically aware of the new ways to kill the unwanted baby.
When Wolverine slept with Magneto it was a real mess.

[Pause for a four count.]

[Hmmmmmmmmmmm!]

The poetic hmmmmm can be traced back to Emily Dickinson and Amy Lowell's UMass Amherst reading in 1899, first enacted by President Chester Arthur. He may have been falling asleep, it is not known. The Amherst Daily Bell reports it thusly:

"And the creepy poetess who lived in the attic read some nonsense about a grasshopper in a spiderweb reading Proust. The president then made a great noise that risethed in the throat that startled many in attendance. They had only attended to get blurbs from Amy Lowell. But this sound here-after became a gesture, a way of saying to the reader 'Yes! Yes! We're with you! Now giveth me a blurb!'"

Poetry is the lonliest business. Only onanism can match it, but there's obviously much bigger payoffs to that magnificent art. Let us proudly once again hmmmmm when the poems get poemy.