Moving into the Beyond

This past Wednesday, April 8th, Jane Gregory, a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, read from her work as part of the ongoing Talk Art readings at the Mill in downtown Iowa City. Her work was introduced as being “challenging, literally challenging, meditative” and the small room with about thirty attendees was warned: “Try to keep up with Jane’s work; that is the point.” In comparison to other Talk Art performances, Gregory’s poetry seemed more academic and her performance more professional, a reading that required an attentive audience (given fair warning) to key into the small nuances of her poetry.

Commanding the stage with an overall seriousness for her work, Gregory expected her listeners to do the same, beginning her reading by commenting, “My poems are not so funny, but I will work on that for next time.” The Mill, a restaurant and bar with a hometown quaintness that usually attracts blue grass and banjo playing bands, and likewise audiences seeking such entertainment, was a peculiar venue for Gregory’s poetry in that its academic quality was probably more suited to a Prairie Lights crowd of listeners. She read in a straight forward and fluid manner that sounded much like reading academic prose, leaving no room in her performance –or any indication by voice, of line break or poetic syntax. Despite the juxtaposition of poet and venue, Gregory’s work impressed the gathering and even brought the listeners to applause at the conclusion of a poem dedicated to another member in the Workshop.

Most poem titles involved going “beyond” such as “Faith in the Never Beyond,” “If the Hunt is also called Beyond,” and “How we Came Beyond Faith.” The theme of “beyond” brings with it ideas of religion, identity, and questions of the cosmos. Typically such topics have a tendency to lean toward cliché, but Gregory writes deceptively simple statements in her poetry that yearn to be re-examined: “If God gave up on night,” “You mistook my explanation for God,” and “What if God were moved to speak?” While it was never made clear as to what Gregory was exactly going “beyond,” her poetry included a sense of arrival after a long personal journey and a beckoning for others to join her, apparent in lines such as, “Here I am, pure noise” and “Beyond where the moon shone, oh how I want you to have a voice!”

Picking up on Gregory’s use of sound and language was more difficult because of the nature of her reading style. However, a close listener could not have missed the internal rhymes, puns, and Gregory’s overall interest in word formation. The use of internal rhyme may be what saved her from sounding purely prose. While the rhyme was not the strongest or most original, “this alien light in which the night bored us in,” it did offer a nice break from the fluidity of Gregory’s reading. Most interesting about her writing, though, is the way it asks to be thought of on a word by word basis. For example, Gregory writes, “In many languages this rhymes with misfit,” which both asks a listener to compare this and misfit in English in the different uses of the words, but also in accordance with other languages and how a connection between the two might be created. Finally, Gregory states, “Who gave us the word really to tell us degrees of reality?” This last line embodies the nuances in her poetry and the interworking of the poems on a word by word basis. Gregory not only asks about the origin of the words and how they came into being, but uses the words as objects put into conversation with one another rather than as only words in a stream of consciousness.

Wednesday night Talk Art at the Mill gives both the Workshop and the community an opportunity to interact. Jane Gregory’s reading proved to be academic and professional, her work demanding close attention and reading, her poetry asking for more than one examination. Gregory’s work is nicely summarized in a colleague’s words as, “Poetry that you can never touch but can always believe in.”

Kathryn Duffy