A healthy crowd of people (maybe 50? 60?) gave up a few hours of good August twilight and crammled down the stairs into Elliott Bay’s underground book-cathedral reading room. They were an interesting bunch, diverse in age if not in hair color—lots of blonds. They were young, old, in-between; they were established in the lit scene, brand new, or professed to not know what the hell I meant by “lit scene;” they were locals and they were out-of-towners. I got a sort of fuzzy sense that the majority of the attendees might actually have just been readers and not writers of poetry. This was a hopeful sign to me, one that indicated an honest-to-goodness receptive audience for poetry in Seattle, one that could enjoy both Hoogs and Skoog, two poets with very different aesthetics. 

I want to stop here for a second and do a little full-disclosure thing. Skoog and I are brothers in banya, and have been shvitzing for a year or two now. When he visits to do a reading we try to make time for a run through the hot-cold cycle at a Russian bathhouse, wherein we engage in delirious steam chatter and story-telling. Hoogs heads up the programming department at Seattle Arts and Lectures (SAL), and so I know her as one of Seattle’s arts administration powerhouses. On top of that, she teaches at UW’s Rome Program, with which I’m tangentially related.

All of this is to say that for me, the Hoogs and Skoog poetry reading started at 4:00PM in the crazy carnie-rococo setting of the Unicorn, with Skoog doing a rendition of Edith Wharton’s fantastic poem (?…!) “Terminus” in the old high style of Yeats. We thought we’d celebrate his brief return to Seattle and my recent return from Washington’s Department of Human Services (whereupon I procured my first ever EBT card (called “the Louisiana Purchase” in NOLA, Skoog assures me) with a few gins and burgers and tater tots (all on him). And celebrate we did.

After a little catch-up session I asked Skoog if it “got better” for us poets, in terms of finances, a general sense of security, happiness, and the rest. He just laughed and laughed. It was a very sad and true laugh that sort of cut me. Luckily, we’re easily distracted. When I told him that I’d chanced across an Edith Wharton poem, and that it was particularly good, he grabbed the phone from my hands and read it aloud to me and to another fine Seattle poet who’d joined our revelry, a one Sasha LaPointe, and to any other patron who cared to overhear. At the poem’s conclusion, we all headed to Elliot Bay for the reading.

All of this sort of colored the experience of the reading proper for me, and I’m not just talking about the gin. What is the place of poetry—and, more specifically, poetry readings—in the lives of all of these people? Back to reality.

After the crowd settled into the creaky little foldout chairs, after some inevitable chatter about Hoogs’s and Skoog’s names rhyming, and after a world-weary Elliott Bay bookseller provided us a serviceable introduction to the poets, Skoog stood before the bookstore’s organ-shaped bookshelf and gave a small summary of his work. He claimed that the general thrust and theme of his book Rough Day, out from Copper Canyon Press, was the rebuilding of the self after destruction. Indeed, the poems he selected painted a portrait of a pleasure-seeking picador just trying to figure out what the hell happened while looking out at America though the slow-moving frame of a boxcar. Ominous and heartbreaking lines like, “How we tear the billboard down is how we tear the house down / you down me / each time I come home I fall apart” yielded to the provisionally hopeful, “I haven’t ruined my body yet with joy,” or “I am only beginning to feel love.” Skoog is kind of the master of flat declarative sentences you can get behind, and at this reading, he delivered the lines with the confidence and cadence of a senator you’d vote for. Each poem’s tonal drama—its moves from hard-won-ecstasy to deep-and-silent-sadness—served as the major form of cohesion for the listener. Even if you didn’t quite know what the speaker was getting at, you knew that the poem started sort of weird and happy and then ended up weird and sad, and that you felt it the whole way through. This is not to say that the whole thing was doom and boom and serious pub talk. There were chuckles, too. I dare you not to laugh at this line: “because I’m American I can see // how to build from found objects / a really excellent bong.”

Like Skoog, Hoogs is a playful yet careful poet, but she plays in a different sandbox. Reading from her debut collection of poems entitled Self-Storage, out from Steven F. Austin State University Press, Hoogs presented several crowd-pleasers. Some jokey or politely bawdy; some tear jerkers. Her subjects ranged from newspaper mini-games to a jar that allegedly contained a piece of Shelley’s Jaw, and she treated each with a warm intelligence and a refreshing sense of humor. In general, she showcased a real command of conceits and persona poems. For instance, in “Another Plot Cliché” the speaker posits herself as a sheet of glass being carried by two workers and her lover as a high-speed car chase doomed to bust up the glass. The poem challenges cliché as it traffics in it, and the push and pull of her clever language play (mostly punny turns of phrase, a la Shakespeare or Heather McHugh: “…done up with bullets that haven’t yet done you in. / I know I’m done for…”) carried the audience along to the inevitable but moving shattering. That one got chuckles and then a pretty solid “aw.” Her calm and clear and steady pace let sing the music she wrenched from arranging her words just so, and thus complimented well the formal engines that drove the poems.

The audience, myself included, seemed to equally enjoy Skoog’s associative gut-punchers and Hoogs’s witty, linear lyric verses. And the thing that killed me about this reading was the fact of the 12-year-old sitting in front of me, variously chuckling or “hmming” with the rest of us. She was wearing a t-shirt that she absolutely made herself, a great straw hat, and braces. When Hoogs announced the reading of Walt Whitman’s work at the Unauthorized Reading series in Fremont, this young lady turned to her mother and mouthed, “MOM! THAT SOUNDS SO COOL.” Her enthusiasm reflected the general sense of joy and fellow-feeling that was circulating around the room. It was the enthusiasm for language at the heart of Skoog’s lonely picador, and at the heart of Hoogs’s speakers. It was damn near brighter than the sun that was dying anyway.