Poet Chris Anderson read from his book “The Next Thing Always Belongs” at a Reading At the Nick series in the Linfield College Nicholson Library. Anderson is a member of the cooperative press Airlie Press.
It seems poetry is almost exclusively read on a page (paper or electronic) in the privacy of our own minds. The poem comes to us in the sound of our voice and to our personal cadences and rhythms. The experience of poetry has not been and is not now a solitary internal affair of reading. Throughout history poetry has been a literary performance art. Seeing and hearing a poet present their work gives an appreciation and an understanding of the person and their poetry which a page cannot approach.
Chris Anderson demonstrates there can be a fusion of prose and poetry. He took a break from reading from his book to say he has been thinking about what poetry means. He moves from that question to saying that for him poetry is a kind of spiritual practice. He then begins spiral up catching rhetorical thermals by Anthony DeMello and keeps going up with lifts from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, until he is at the apex. Still. Ready. Then he folds his wings, an Osprey plunging towards a glimmer just under the surface. He concludes “the moment is precious because it is so fragile, so small, so fleeting.”
Anderson shows all of the poet’s art. The value of filming is that you can experience for yourself Chris Anderson taking you from wondering about the value of poetry to the fragility of the moment. He follows his homily, as he called it, with a new poem "Crazy Cake".
