Arts & Culture Blog

Arts & Culture Blog

Days and Nights Festival's Beautiful Ruckus in the Woods

Wednesday night, Philip Glass and his Days and Nights Festival, having been blessed with sun-infused days and temperate nights at Carmel Valley's Hidden Music Seminars, staged the poetry/music portion of the festival in the cool, dense fog of Big Sur's Henry Miller Library. It was a show that harnessed atmospheric lighting and a film projector and amplifiers to pierce the darkness and the silence of the redwood forest.

Henry Miller Executive Director Magnus Toren, with typical humility, greeted the audience, a respectable number of people for an artistic Wednesday night show in the woods. That affable and ramshackle charm of Toren's, which has endeared him to Glass and countless others, also inspired Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, as reported by music man-about-town Adam Joseph, to write a song about him and Big Sur; it's track three on the new album Helplessness Blues, Toren confided to the Weekly. Then he introduced another humble man, Philip Glass.

Glass was brief in words. After thanking the attendees, he sat at his keyboard and gave the floor over to the four poets of the evening: Eleni Sikleianos, teacher at University of Denver; poet, translator (a nuanced art) and filmmaker Francesco Levato; Maria Garcia Teutsch, editor-in-chief of Hartnell College's literary magazine Homestead Review as well as the Henry Miller Library's Ping-Pong; and former NPR war correspondent and highly regarded performance poet Jerry Quickley.

Glass played to start the performance, with all four poets lined up on stage, launching into "Footnote to Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. The poets traded lines that repeated the same basic meter, like a chant: "The typewriter is holy/ the poem is holy/ the voice is holy/ the hearers are holy/ the ecstasy is holy!" While each poet took a verse, the others incanted, underneath, "holy, holy, holy, holy, holy…" while Glass' delicately accompanied.

Quickly took the next four poems solo, accompanied by Glass. His "Amsterdam Townhouse" to Glass' "Etude no. 10"; "Tarpits," about the pain of a break-up, to Glass' "Opening" from the focused, driven and pretty breakthrough album Glassworks. Glass would return to that album to accompany poet Sikelianos on her final piece, "Shadow Zoo."

The "chorus" of poets returned to recite Patti Smith's "Blue Thankga." Then Levato and Teutsch teamed up on a two poems that were accompanied by an art film of scenes of 1950s domestic bliss—so blissful that it didn't take much coaxing from Glass' ironic and creepy accompaniment to make it look like lunacy—superimposed on top of each other, sometimes three deep. The poets traded verses that explored sex, the self, relationships and its bonds (here, the filmmaker got literal and a bit sensational by superimposing a naked woman being tied by male hands S&M style).

The Youth Orchestra of the Americas joined in on their second poem, "Variations on Want, Sequence III" (their first reading was "Sequence I") and their crisp sound amplified and filled out the readings they accompanied. The musicians were a string quartet sent from YOA to play the Days and Nights Festival: violin Ana Drobac, originally from Belgrade; violin Myles P. McKeown Meza from Xalapa, Mexico; cellist Edvany Klebia da Silva from Joao Pessoa, Brazil; and violinist Manuel Tabora from San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The chorus returned on Ginsberg's "Aunt Rose," then Sikelianos unleashed three poems from a collection dubbed The California Series, accompanied by evocative black-and-white photos and an unexpected element. The two heat lamps on the stage (it was chilly enough that Glass crossed his arms and kept his hands tucked under his elbows to ward off stiffening fingers) were caught in the light of the projector, making a shadow. And thelight caught also the heat roiling up from them and projected that onto the screen in sinewy, billowing waves that crawled and slithered upwards. Nice visuals.

Finally, all four poets returned front and center.

"We're gonna get a little hip-hop up in here," Quickley said. "A little call-and-response!"

The last poem of the night reprized Ginsberg's "Footnotes to Howl," but this time with the words superimposed on the screen for the audience to join the chorus. And they did. Big time. Like some literary karaoke, chugging along with Glass and the string quartet, seemingly every voice in the audience yelling out to meet those of the poets' and the music, everything that could make sound, made sound.

"Holy the sea/ holy the desert/ holy the railroad/ holy the locomotive; holy the visions/ holy the hallucinations/ holy the miracles/ holy the eyeball/ holy the abyss!"

The all-encompassing chorus got louder, yelling, in unison as neared poem's end.

"Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!/ Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!"

Holy was right.