Channeling Skype

Having a child who lives in Scotland, and telephone rates being what they are, I am happy to satisfy my need of mother-talk via Skype, using our computers as telephones and paying exactly nothing. Yes, you heard me correctly. Zero. Nada. Rien.

However, today I realized why I always think of my Great-Aunt (or maybe that’s Great-Great-Aunt) Clementine every time I call my daughter.

Clemmie, as she was called, was married to Uncle George, who had charged up a hill with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American (so-called) War.. Clemmie brewed up her week’s worth of coffee all at once and stored it in jars under the sink. Her great romance, before Uncle George, had been at the St. Louis World’s Fair. She always carried $3000.00 in her purse and all her rings in a little bag around her neck.

When she went missing from time to time, everybody raced to the bus station and pulled her off the bus St. Louis-bound. Eventually, long after Uncle George joined Teddy Roosevelt, Aunt Clemmie passed on to that great World’s Fair in the sky.

She was a home-loving gal, however, and one of the great-nieces had a bit of a gift for psychic things. One of the most exciting events I remember from my childhood was when the telephone call would came, “Get over here quick. Clemmie’s trying to come through!” Then we all got to sit around in a circle in a darkened room and try to decipher the bits of disconnected babble that was Clemmie trying to find out what was going on , or to tell us something important about the afterlife. We never got the message clearly enough to find out. There would be some noises, “H-h-h-huh...” “Hello, Aunt Clemmie, is that you? We’ve got a bad connection. Try again.”

We would watch the dancing balls of light and brush bits of ectoplasm off our faces and shout back and forth to no avail for a couple of hours, asking questions about the afterlife and getting busts of stutter and babble in return.

This would go on some time until we gave up, coffee cake and mugs of cocoa came out and we all went home feeling we’d been in touch with something stately and grave.

Oh, right, that’s why I remember Clemmie when I Skype with my daughter. “Mu-mu-mu-mom, is that yyyyyyyyyoooooooooouuuuuuuuuu? Can you hu-hear-gobble-squawk-fadeout?” And I reply, “We have a bad connection. Can you hear me?” “Yes, I can hear you now. Can you hear me?” Sort of like the early days of CB radio. Remember that? “X calling Y. Are you receiving me, Y?” I remember my father going on like that all evening. My Skype call again.

But it’s a blessing. A good part of the time, it works. No matter how happy we are to talk, the conversation is sweetened by the fact that I’m not paying by the minute. Sometimes, there are extra-special glitches, like last night, when I realized I was saying this: “Aunt Clemmie? Is that you? Get off the line! I’m trying to talk to my daughter.” When this happens, we hang up and try again and fifty percent of the time, it works!

Poetry Readings As Sacred Space

I am still in the afterglow of my featured reading at Robin’s Bookstore last night,. Robin’s is Philadelphia’s revered independent bookstore and literary Mecca. How grateful I am when I have a poetry reading and people actually come to hear me read. Let out sharp little intakes of breath. Smile. Laugh. Say afterward that THEY ACTUALLY ENJOYED MY WORK

I think we take it too much for granted that in small rooms in bookstores, coffeehouses, church basements, and on street corners all over the United States (and I suspect all over the world), people gather to get naked together via the words they have written. Being basically a shy person who longs for the life of a cloistered nun, I find it difficult to face a reading but I become filled with delight as the evening goes on and I realize people are listening carefully to these words the duende brought to me.

In addition, for me, one of the most joyous parts of a reading, one I always look forward to, is the open reading that follows the featured reading. If I am not the featured reader, I often go to other people’s readings and participate in the open mike. While we're on the subject, let me say there is a special place in hell for featured readers who do not have the courtesy to stay and hear the poems of those who have come to hear them. These people are strapped in slippery folding chairs beside microphones that read a monotonous alphabet to them for all eternity. (Oh, pray for mercy—even the self-obsessed may hope for redemption.) But I love the opens as much as the features, although in a different way.

The people who read in the open often tend to be newbies, those who haven’t published much yet, students, people in mid- or late-life who have just written their first poem, people who have written for the drawer a la Emily Dickinson for years and are just now creeping out of their room and venturing to share work, 13-year-olds who have just discovered haiku, cowpokes and mechanics and elderly, tattooed Hell’s Angels who pull out a poem written in pencil on the back of an old envelope..

Such work is often not polished but it invariably contains elements of naked truth. You are being privileged glimpses within someone’s thoughts and souls that I have not encountered in any other place. For some it stops there but you start to have a family feeling simply because you have come to know a lot about this person. For as many years as you encounter such people, they will continue to read similar poems, which you appreciate for their content. For others, you notice over the years that they are studying and learning more about the craft, which of course allows their thoughts to strike deeper within the listeners’ hearts.

Readings, whether in subterranean drippy caverns or lofty rooms where through Palladian windows you see the tops of trees, are sacred places, where we gather to enact over and over the rituals that we hope will open the numinous to us, even as do churches, theatres and maternity wards full of newborn babies.