Julia Cohen filed this review of the opening night of the Fall 2008 KGB Monday Night Poetry Series hosted by Michael Quattrone and Laura Cronk:
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With a defunct microphone, there aren’t two better voices to fill a room and jump start the new KGB reading season than those belonging to Janice Erlbaum and Kevin Young. Yet, while both are performative and engaging poets, the focus of their poetics center on very different issues. Erlbaum’s background is in memoir writing, and her poems speak to the human tendency to rationalize and normalize bizarre social tensions and patters that develop from the modern day workforce and marriage. Young’s poems range from blues-based love songs to poems with a country western slant (hello Johnny Cash and Gram Parsons), and from elegies to odes for everyday things (hello homemade wine and hominy), which meditate on the meaning of and inextricable link between family, home, heritage, death and grief, racism, tradition, and American history.
Following an introduction from Star Black, Erlbaum opened with two sestinas that varied widely in tone. The first, "The Temp," humorously explores the new phenomena of ‘the office husband,’ the surrogate and platonic partner of the workplace. As Erlbaum confirms, "He belongs to you, / Like the menu you stow in your desk." While playfully describing how "the desk is your bed, the bed is your desk," this poem jabs at the pervasive commitment to overtime and excessive dedication to ones job, which can misguide your priorities and distance you from your legal spouse, you know- the one you go home to at the end of the day. Before reading, "How Do Married People Masturbate," Elbaum cunningly admits, "I wrote this poem before I was married, but now I know." Here, she speaks to the tension, loneliness, and insecurity that can surface in a relationship when the quest for a little bit of ‘personal space’ collides with your partner’s desire to always offer the sexual gratification you, well, just sometimes want to find alone.
There are some poets whose work you might find easier to understand when read on the page and other poets whose work you better connect with when heard out loud. The poets I’m most impressed with are those who, like Young, transcend these categories. While his spoken poems engulf you and draw you in (tongue-in-cheek word play, colloquial language, and welcome references to his personal history), the span of the written text, like the five sections that compose his newly released Dear Darkness (Feb 2008), cohere into a complex network of cultural and political observation and engagement.
— Julia Cohen
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