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Laura Dixon holds a B.A. in literature from The University of Chicago and an M.A.T. from Dominican University. She has worn many hats, from teacher and coach to circus performer. She is currently a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, working toward her M.F.A. in poetry, with a fiction minor. She has been featured at numerous Chicago venues, including the Green Mill, Fitzgerald’s, and Lollapalooza.
1-In one version of your bio-there are references to tight rope walking and unicycles. From the sound of it, it looks like you come from a performance background, care to elaborate?
Dixon-I performed with the Triton Troupers Circus for five years during the 90’s, mostly unicycling and juggling, though I have dipped my toe in with the tightrope a little bit. And once I was one of the magic girls. Both of my brothers performed with the Troupers as well. I also had a juggling role as one of the Players in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at The University of Chicago. I was passing clubs around Rosencrantz (Or was it Guildenstern? Does it matter?) on opening night, when he struck one of my clubs with his face. To the audience it may have appeared that I struck the man’s face with my club, but my club was exactly where it was supposed to be and had been in every rehearsal. In a different play, I recited verse as a carnival barker.
2-You also have a pretty impressive slam background, what was it like playing Lollapalooza?
Dixon-Performing at the Spoken Word Tent of Lollapalooza (1994) was a lot of fun, mostly because of the great group of poets assembled by Lisa Buscani. I won the one-round slam, and part of the prize was a main stage performance. But then it turned out there was a lot of time left to kill, so the organizers added a second round. I ended up coming in third in the extra round, but the winner (Dean Hacker) stepped aside and sent me to main stage. Performing on the main stage was terrifying. I think I was opening for A Tribe Called Quest, and I heard there were between twenty and thirty thousand people in the crowd. Mostly I felt sick to my stomach. Backstage, some guys who I think were the Beastie Boys made fun of me for being nervous, which made me even more nervous. I couldn’t hear myself talking when I did my poem, so I was glad to hear afterward that people were able to hear me. Everyone said it went well. Then I went with Dean to watch The Flaming Lips.
3-this is a tricky one. What do you think are the major differences between Slam Poetry, Page Poetry, and Open Mic Performance Poetry?
Dixon-I can’t give a definitive answer to this question, but I’ll share a few impressions. Slam poetry is about performance and writing, and the best Slam poets attend effectively to both. Slam poems, because they must engage a live audience and be comprehensible on a first hearing, often tend toward dramatic monologue. The competitive aspect of a Slam, though not always my preference, promotes intensity in the performances. In my experience, some open mic poets perform and others do a straight reading from the page. It obviously depends a lot on the particular audience and venue as well. Open mics seem to catch a little bit of everything. Good “page” poetry makes effective use of lineation, and it has greater liberty to work with nuances of language or ideas that might be missed on a single hearing. Poets who write exclusively for the page should still be concerned with musicality, with how the poem sounds when read aloud. There is ultimately no dark line between these different forms of poetry. The inner music of the poem, its inventiveness, and its play with language are paramount for all forms of poetry. In some cases, the same poem might be effective on the page, in a straight reading, or in performance, while other poems might not be as versatile.
4-All writers have influences, who are some of yours?
Dixon-It would be hard for me to say whose influences are apparent in my writing, but there are certainly poets who have contributed to my love of poetry and to my thinking about poetry. Early on, I immersed myself in reading Louise Glück, Li-Young Lee, and Robert Hass. Every once in a while, to my delight, someone has noted their possible influence on my writing. Later, I came to admire particularly the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Carl Phillips, and Wallace Stevens, among others. Over the past year, some of my favorites have been Bob Hicok, Ed Pavlic, Dean Young, Mark Doty, Brooks Haxton, and Elizabeth Bishop. Poetry performance is no longer my main focus, but it was definitely where I started. My main influences within Slam poetry were Marc Smith, Lisa Buscani, and Dean Hacker, all of whom have been actively supportive and nurturing of my efforts.
5-In my experience, including self examination, Poets are quirky in how, when and where they feel comfortable writing. Some are all about the music in the background, the notebook their writing in, the pen they use, some have to type it out on computer for instant editing. Do you have any particular process?
Dixon-I definitely prefer to compose directly on the computer, but I often work from handwritten notes that I have collected here and there. I strongly prefer to write in solitude—without other people, without other noise. I don’t tend to write in coffee shops. I HATE impromptu in-class writing prompts—I spend the whole time listening to the other people breathe. When I start to write a poem, I prefer to explore interesting lines or phrases and see where they take me, rather than trying to start from an idea. When I start with a specific idea, I often find myself trapped by the “point” that I want to make and feel less free to play with language and to make unexpected discoveries.
“Killer Poet” an opinion:
by Buddha 309
The documentary “Killer Poet”
is an interesting film. It covers many
things. Mostly it talks about the long
journey to capture one man. This man is
someone I’m not sure I ever met. The man was named Norman Porter.
Wikipedia has this to say about Norman Porter…
Porter pleaded guilty to charges of second-degree
murder in the 1960 fatal shooting of twenty-two year old part-time clothing
store clerk, John Pigott, at the Robert Hall clothing store in
While in prison, Porter earned an undergraduate
degree from
Jameson was connected with Porter when fingerprints
taken during his 1993 arrest were matched against Porter's fingerprints in an
FBI database after a police officer saw his picture as Poet of the Month on
ChicagoPoetry.com.
On
Killer Poet goes about its
business revealing the facts regarding the hunt for fugitive Norman Porter. They interview friends and family of the
victims, they interview police officers and newspaper personnel, and it all
seems to be a very neat package.
Did I mention that I never
met Norman Porter?
The guy I met was a
cantankerous old poet/activist. I didn’t
know him all that well, but the stories I heard were enough for the man to have
my respect. I knew J.J. Jameson
(also from Wikipedia)
J. J. Jameson (also
known as Norman A. Porter, Jr.)
was a self-proclaimed poet
and activist in Chicago,
Illinois
from the mid-1980s until March 2005. His work was marked by an ironic and
humorous cast. In 1993 Jameson was arrested on theft charges in
He
was known for his live performances as a poet and MC at local poetry jams and
open mike nights. He also received attention for his September 1999 poetry
chapbook, Lady Rutherford's Cauliflower, published by Puddin'head Press,
which had been planning to publish a second volume of his work this year. He
was known to be suffering from head tumors in early 2005. Friends and acquaintances
planned to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his arrival in
What was missing from this documentary was
the heart and soul of the man we called J.J.
There were a few anecdotes from the people he was close to here in
I realize that upon his arrest, he pleaded
guilty, and I also realize that those charges were decades old.
I’m probably not the guy to review this
film. I believe that Leopard’s have movable spots. I also believe people can change. I believe that the more interesting story is
about staying off the police radar fro 20 years, and living your life doing
good for others.
As much as I wanted to know about Norman
Porter (a man I never met), I was hoping
the world would get to meet J.J. That’s
my problem with “Killer Poet.” It only
tells part of the story, and glosses over the 20 years that weren’t in the
papers.
Review of Performance of “Pentecost,” from the Mercury Café, Jan. 30, 2009
By Kristin La Tour
It came almost out of nowhere, voices reading the performance poem “Pentecost” based on four men’s experiences with faith. Composed by Scott DeKatch, Matt Barton, Esteban Colon and Tom Curry, the poem is the brainchild of Barton who orchestrated the poem and its performance. Instead of all walking up to the mic, the readers stayed where they were seated and read their parts from throughout the Mercury Cafe, giving the feeling of four people talking without seeing each other, not speaking to each other, but not really addressing an audience either. It bordered on voyeuristic as audience members sat with eyes closed or scanning the readers as the moved through the work. Three of the authors read their own parts, while two more poets joined in as the fourth speaker and the voice of God.
Other than references to God, Christ or a deity, it might be hard for a listener to really get the religious or faith aspect of the poem from just hearing it. The strongest impressions from the reading were the emotions that came out from the different speakers. The first voice was one of the more narrative, and one that built up from nostalgia and calmness to a crescendo of anger repeating the refrain, “Put your cigarette out in my eye.” The second rushed out in anger comparing God looking down from Heaven to various negative persons like an ex-boyfriend looking into a camera with a sickening smile, or to someone watching over a family arguing through a Christmas holiday. There was a detached speaker telling about his father’s trips to Sunday mass to shake hands with a famous boxer at the Sign of Peace, and then an academic voice frustrated that people would even have belief in a higher power given all the history and wrongdoing of mankind.
Overall, the way the poem moved through the four speakers, the lines getting shorter and readers giving a sense of being interrupted by the end, leaving listeners with a scrubbing of raw emotion as the men told God to “Fuck off,” told a someone to again, “Put a cigarette out in my eye.” In different hands, in voices other than the authors’, I think this raw emotion will still come out, and I hope that others will take it up and keep performances of “Pentecost,” and poems like it, going. It’s refreshing to hear something so active and engaging from multiple voices in the midst of single poets reading their work alone at a microphone.
ON CONSIDERING A VERSE REVIEW OF KATHLEEN ROONEY'S ONEIROMANCE
by Christopher Gallinari
It's only a dopplegänger if it's trying to
kill you, my friend Buddha tells me,
and I think, that's the point, as I consider
Kathleen Rooney's volume of poems,
Oneiromance, an Epithalamion,
published last year by Switchback Books
which is kind enough to consider
books written not only by women but also
female-identified individuals.
Oneiroi, brothers or sons of the Greek god
of sleep, personifications of dream
(whether troubled or otherwise), and
romance, melded into one word as title:
Rooney's epithalamion is a sequence
of dreams, written to her sister and herself,
two women who marry two brothers twice,
first in South America, then for good measure
in our Northern Hemisphere, where friends
can join the party. My girlfriend tells me
ancient Greeks considered how all humans
first had four arms and legs, then were split by
jealous gods with lightning bolts, left to wander
the world after our missing halves. The Church
knows its Greek, teaches that man and woman,
when married, become one flesh. But flesh
is only half the story, the half that each of us
already has memorized in satin or leather, latex
or bareback, the scholar who advised my girlfriend
marriage was only ten per cent Aristotle, ninety
per cent laundry. More agitating is that descent
into the classic, disorienting confrontation of
something larger than ourselves, as Rooney
describes through the words of her uncle,
a Brazilian patriarch, whose syntax is tortured:
"One another's
bold standards & hot weather marks.
You will long for each other like the walrus
for the full moon,
& if anything happens
to one, it will be like a jogger in the other's heart"
as if by some paramilitary grammar squad:
"The first door crashes aside
to reveal something old: a military dictator,
long since resigned, playing a box
of Tropicalia records, the girl from Ipanema
atop his uniformed knee. It's the end
of the road for me, my friends, he says, shaking, skin
flaking like ash. But your journey's just beginning."
And, from "Brazilian Wedding: Dream No. 3:"
"we are crossing a bridge.
We have crossed our uncle
& our fiancés will be cross,
but we've got a long list,
a lot of items to cross off.
...
We are still over the river.
Can it ever be crossed?
I pop the G out of bridge
& drop it in the bay. I say
bride aloud. G is for groom...."
As Rooney declares from the outset:
"Instinct says, Sleep with the lights on again.
Amen to that. You talk in your sleep.
Go ahead & run -- you'll just die tired."
Following the geographic sequence of ceremonies,
the more exotic soon gives way to images
more prosaic yet still ominous:
"He wears a hunting cap. One of the earflaps snaps off
like ice, clatters to the floor. No one stoops to pick it up.
No one hand it back. I won't bore you with a long ceremony.
You cock the trigger, a crack that sickens up & down my spine."
Even the traditional Niagara Falls honeymoon
fails to emerge unscathed:
"Fifteen people have gone over
in a device. Fifteen in all, & always
counting, the mounting survivors,
the climbing numbers crushed."
It's only a dopplegänger if it's trying to
kill you, yet what is marriage to a woman
in the twenty-first century, if not a mixture of
hope and fear of a deeper form of surrender,
joint tenancy by the entirety, the handing off
of chattels from fathers to sons-in-law?
She may wind up losing her identity, not only as
female but individual, as well. Rooney concedes
as much but in the end she will not be deterred,
proclaiming almost defiantly:
"None were honeymooners like us."
Invoking the quiet, tensile strength of her forebears
she vows:
"My own
growing hair will keep us warm,
keep our fond emotions from cooling.
Pooling at our feet, it will stop us
from slipping on the risky gangways
in the Cave of Winds."
Rooney's world is ours, filled with dopplegangers
enough already, those thieves of name and number
who won't select the unwed out from their victims.
So, why not take the plunge? My own first one
killed me, too, before resurfacing into ash
where I learned, after spending several weeks trying
to derive a poem from a patent application
by my girlfriend's brother, the printhead engineer,
all along it was a different monopoly
garnered by another man with an identical name,
working the same field. Two Michael John D_____s
on opposite sides of the Atlantic, each striving
to improve upon computer printer technology?
But poetry already presents enough questions
and Rooney is kind enough to punctuate her
sentences with periods, her anxieties with
a promise of sorts to herself, as well as her spouse:
"By the light of the PBR sign above the bar
it's hard to tell one bride from her sister,
but I assure you, darling, I'm pretty sure I'm me."
Rooney and her personae address their fears
without succumbing to them or the temptation of
an overly simplistic triumph over them.
I'm pretty sure you should
consider buying a copy of this book,
Michael John, each of you.
And, yes, it makes a fine wedding gift.
