I've heard Jane read at various venues in NYC, but last Friday's
feature at Cornelia Street Cafe was my first full-length exposure to her
work. It's still impossible, two days later, to describe the impact of
that reading on me. That evening many open-mic readers read good poems:
striking ideas, surprising phrasing, brilliant images. But Jane's
reading crushed all of us, or, at least that was how I felt.
Her poems--discontinuous, imagistic, chant-like, wide-ranging in its
references, sonically dense--challenge more traditional ways of putting
a poem together. She made us sound old-fashioned, more, she made us
sound artificial, our tidy methodical artefacts simulacra of reality,
instead of the postmodern reality caught and then broadcast like a radio
signal from her poems. She does not make me want to write like her, but
challenges me to write better in my own way, to prove that my style is
also adequate, in some sense, to reality.
You can read her work on her
website, and listen
to her reading on Myspace
and Youtube. None of it quite captures the electricity of her live
performance. She is not merely a terrific performer; she makes the old
distinction between page and stage obsolete.