MARATHON reading

For a bunch of years, I did the Freedom to Read 24 hour marathon that the MWG did, usually with my writing group, usually sometime after midnight.

But for the past coupla years, I've done a different kind of marathon. A MARATHON reading, of a text, usually a long poem but sometimes an entire book. With thirty or so other readers.

We read the work, beginning to end, without cumbersome introductions or preambles. We just step to the mic, read our assigned page, and then step away. And then another writer/poet/interested party steps up to the mic.

In years past, as a part of Aqua's Mondo! Poetry festival, we've done MARATHON readings of Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue and George Elliott Clarke's Execution Poems.

On Tuesday, a bunch of us - locals and family and out-of-towners - read Anne Szumigalski's Risks. Which is thirty-two or thirty-eight pages, but really only consists of a stanza a page (i.e. sweet but short...).

And so, when we were done, we read it again.

Let me tell you how much of a goddamn pleasure it is to be part of a chorus, to hear all the voices all over the work. To hear the work so differently.

(Yay! Fun!)