The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts October 6, 2006

Columbia Poets Surprise

A couple of weeks ago, The Grape published a picture of an empty Cat in the Cream and inserted the caption “The Cat at Poetry Readings” below. Well, a certain kind of person might populate the readings at the Cat, but it is certainly not an invisible person. 

Saturday night’s “Heartland Poetry Tour with Tom and Emmett” at first drew a crowd of mostly English and creative writing majors, but whether due to the reading’s unusual flavor or the non-musical sounds coming from the doorway, others trickled in to hear the pairing of Emmett Tracy and Tom Haushalter.

Tracy, touting a gnarly mustache, was the first of the two poets to take the podium. He read a selection of poems inspired mostly by his home of Western North Carolina, including one about “greasing” — a maneuver in which, as work-horses pull logs down a hill, the horses are steered one way and the logs the other, to prevent a log/horse collision.

Although Tracy’s work drew heavily on the industry and geography of where he grew up, his life since then has allowed him some useful distance — he was a Latin scholar at Williams College, earned his M.F.A. at Columbia University, and now lives and teaches English in Morocco. 

“In Morocco,” he said, “they say you can get anyone to do anything if you give them the raw materials.” Apparently, the book he read from onstage he had seen through production in Marakesh from pig to page. 

The most interesting aspect of Tracy’s reading was his complete departure from the accepted (in some circles) poetry-reading voice. For the dialogue — which abounded — in his poems, he often shouted, especially when the narrator made addresses to a character named “John Wes.”

Tracy and Haushalter alternated reading every few poems, and assisted each other with dialogue accordingly, which made for a pleasantly fleshed-out effect, often not discernible from the poem on the page, or even from only one person’s voice. 

If Tracy read poems as if he were your Southern grandpa telling you not to go in the woods at night (yours, not mine), then Haushalter made you blink and wonder where all the Yalies were. 

Haushalter read loftier poetry, accentuated by his Dead-Poets-Society reading voice, in which he broached such topics as the glories of high school football and what happens when you are in a difficult relationship and in a hotel room at the same time. 

Haushalter is also a recent graduate of Columbia’s M.F.A. program.  He and Tracy have been touring together for three years, a boast few poets are able to make.

A refreshing respite from the poet-at-the-podium, the pair were quite comfortable on stage, jackets off, munching on Cat cookies as they read and told stories to the audience.


 
 
   

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