No One Listens to Poetry: A Reading: A Review
The name uh really tees this one up.
No One Listens to Poetry: A Reading
w/ Carlos Lara, colin russell, Jules Galbraith, Emilie Lafleur, Marie Ségolène
June 28, 2025
The Rocket Science Room
Montreal, QC
While smoking outside the Atlas Building after No Listens to Poetry (NOLP), a group reading organized by visiting Angelino poet Carlos Lara, I heard someone congratulate performer Jules Galbraith on their set by telling them, “You were like a standup comedian up there!” In the sense that Galbraith, unlike most other readers at the show, seemed comfortable and occasionally spoke to the audience in a conversational manner, they were exactly like a standup comedian up there. In every other sense, they were not. Still, I can’t blame Galbraith’s admirer for the confused compliment: after sitting through a sweltering 90-minute, intermission-free reading in which the majority of the poets read in a droning, affectless monotone with their eyes cast to the wooden floor as if in penance, it would be easy to misremember a few polite chuckles as belly laughs.
I didn’t go to the show expecting to write a review, and so did not take notes during the performances, which will account for the lack of direct quotations in this piece, but what I’m really focused on here is the quality of the reading as a live event. Admittedly, I spend more time thinking about how poetry readings are run and how poetry is performed than most, but the utter dullness of No One Listens to Poetry felt less like a specific failure of programming than a sign of the overall current of how poetry is practiced in what we might call “career track” spaces.1 It feels as though the notion of verse’s supposed unpalatability to non-academic audiences has been so thoroughly ground into younger poets that it is seen as pointless and not a little gauche to read with soul. Lyric poetry, which most of the writing presented at NOLP was, is as much as anything else a reminder of something felt, be it a scorched afterimage of intense grief or a faintly sketched rendering of a subtle private amusement. When you read your own poetry, the ghost of what you were feeling in the moment of its creation stirs in your breast. It is not theatre to allow that emotion to enter your voice as you speak the words—in fact, I would argue that when it does not, this usually evinces either a troubling disconnect between the poet and their own work or the result of a malign academic social conditioning at work. It is natural to fear looking ridiculous, but it is a fear that must be endured on the path to becoming an honest and evocative performer. I saw a lot of the alternative at No One Listens to Poetry, and it was grim.
At least in Carlos Lara’s case, we can say that this approach to performance is a natural extension of his writing style. Not having seen the particular poems he read on the page I can’t speak to their visual formatting, but he tends to favour chains (or perhaps “queues” would be more accurate) of disconnected, lightly-punctuated images and ideas that resemble free associative writing. There is no doubt a big picture concept to each of his projects, and attention to detail at the level of the individual phrase, but his disinterest in (or antipathy to) form and theme2 means the effect of his writing can be a bit like parsing through the output of a glitchy LLM trained entirely on MFA theses and left to run until it smokes. Intriguing lines emerge from time to time, and insanely grating ones, but their relationship to one another is purely circumstantial—your mileage comes down to how much you enjoy the surface aesthetics of his private language.
As a live performer, he does not offer any handholds, dispassionately milling through his dense, lengthy poems at a pace too rapid for the listener to orient themselves or reflect on anything that catches their ear. I would argue this precludes the listener from engaging with the text in any meaningful way, but reading like this seems very much a conscious choice; in a 2020 interview Lara stated that in his estimation “‘Aloud’ is the final state of the poem,” so it’s not as though he scorns poetry’s aurality. There was at least the impression of so much going on in Lara’s poems that some in the audience seemed quite overawed by his volume-dealer approach to verse, and the gravitas with which the barrel-chested poet carries himself. But I couldn’t speculate on how many of them actually took anything from the experience, or were much stimulated by it (let alone enjoyed it). Here’s Lara again from that same interview:
“Human adaptation to extreme unknowing is the beauty, is the one story. Existing as one in the confusion of mind and energy and world outside of world. So the lone element of imagination, untethered, reigns in my heart. I call this the resurrected plasma of a world unseeing.”
Does he call it that? Does he really?3 Anyway, given the superior, “this is like explaining myself to a child” tone Lara likes to take in interviews, he might very well say that the audience’s submissive, nearly autonomic nodding in the wake of his set was the precise response he was looking for (if he were the sort to look, of course). But, famously, poetry audiences will nod and clap at the end of nearly anything, and I can’t help but wonder when the last time was that someone told Lara to his face that he had bored the living shit out of them, which I suppose is what I’m doing here.
None of the other sets that evening were much more lively than Lara’s—colin russell read with such a pallid lack of vigour that I was going to suggest he get his iron levels checked out before it was explained that he just lives in Flatbush4—but I suspect this was less down to these poets having staked out an aesthetic position that required them to bore and more attributable to, variously,
An insufficient amount of thinking about performance as a craft to be honed in conjunction with one’s writing
Nerves
The brittleness that results from trying to present as Hot or Cool while simultaneously Reading Poetry in front of people
Humidity
Creative-writing-department-borne pudendal neuralgia.
The aforementioned Jules Galbraith, either the Tig Notaro or the Andrew Dice Clay of Montreal according to two impassioned fans I can hear brawling in the ruelle behind my apartment, was a welcome contrast. Seemingly very relaxed and happy to be there, they sat in the simple folding chair provided sipping occasionally from a large bottled war and reading from a series of notes on their phone written during a recent stay in Scotland. Galbraith’s style is of that elevated, critical theory-enriched register common in post-Anne Carson/Lisa Robertson experimental writing these days, but they are the rare poet who can make it sound loose, lived in. The Scotland poems had a quality like river water lapping over stones, a flow that felt easy and regular in the big picture, unpredictably eddying in the details. In the older zine of theirs that I picked up at the reading (2022’s Deus, sive amor) Galbraith has a tendency to wander into some overgrown syntactical thickets, but the occasional nature of these new poems, written no doubt while walking, or yearning, or stoned, in whatever brief snatches of unstructured time came available, unlocks an easy observational playfulness that suits the poet. Galbraith wove their reading together with brief, often drily funny anecdotes about where each piece had been written, scrolling through their notes and picking up or dropping segments on the fly. In terms of craft and charm it was largely a winning performance, but one significantly hampered by the speed with which Galbraith zipped through their work. The poems often turned on moments of haiku-like stillness (a la: “I saw the stars fade / and girls appear,” forgive the poor paraphrase) but rather than linger on these moments of intimacy or discovery, letting the reader feel their weight, Galbraith was always restlessly rowing to the next thought, the next image, until even their very fine work began to slide into the undifferentiated miasma in which so much of No One Listens to Poetry squatted like a narcoleptic toad.
By the time Emilie Lafleur closed the evening I felt like I had been being dispassionately but rigorously fucked for so long that I was beginning to dissociate, and I spent the majority of her reading in a loopy daze looking out the window watching the clouds make up their mind about raining. Despite knowing Emilie a bit socially, this was my first encounter with her poetry6 and I came away quite impressed. Her language in these pieces has the scent of Bible leather, derived perhaps from her interests in Catholicism and occultism, and, uncommonly, she grapples with the sorts of grand themes of meaning and existence that many of today’s artists shy away from. It is hard to remember the last time I heard a Montreal writer at any stage of their career attempt to write with grandeur. I’m quite curious to read Lafleur’s work on the page, because predictably I remember next to nothing specific other than the contrast of looking at clouds while she talked about flames. The most peculiar thing about her reading was the juxtaposition in tone between her preacherly words and the way she read them aloud, which had more of the quality of a confident student with good diction who has been asked to read a lengthy passage from the textbook in front of the class. It’s funny, I watched Lafleur perform a comedic conspiracy presentation at the Truth Seeker’s Ball this week and she was delightfully expressive, but faced with her own material her relationship to the text was more ambiguous,7 and some of the intensity of her visions was lost.
As I prepared to write this review, I refreshed myself on the Jack Spicer poem that lent the show it’s name, which is short enough to quote in its entirety below:
“This ocean, humiliating in its disguises”
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.The homage reveals that Lara’s rationale behind calling the show No One Listens to Poetry was not to make the obvious joke about poetry’s unpopularity but to reinforce the notion that poetry’s existence does not depend on being heard, that for all of the thematic and structural (and political and conceptual) frameworks applied to it, verse is ultimately “White and aimless signals.” But if poetry is indeed the ocean in this poem (it’s certainly debatable), part of what Spicer finds in its essential nature is something which nourishes life, which gives that life its essential flavour, is that which makes a good death conceivable. And while each of the poets’ writing had some life in it, I tasted precious little ocean salt in their readings. At least on this day, there were people listening to poetry, or trying to. All they had to do was look out over the edge of their phones or their papers and they would’ve seen us.
OF POTENTIAL INTEREST
How to Perform Your Poetry (the Way I Say It Should Be Done)
More ranting about poetry performance you say? Well alright, but don't say you weren't warned.
Though, this being poetry, said “career” is hardly lucrative: one of the few moments where I felt any sense of solidarity during the event was when I watched Lara divvying out the small take from the door equally among the artists.
“I feel that theme is a futile way of trying to escape self-containment,” Lara told Ploughshares back in 2020. “Theme also precludes a reader from thinking about the work in any kind of original way by foregoing any responsibility a reader might have to leap into the emptiness of the text.”
I hereby pledge to give Lara $1 for every time he has in fact called this idea (or anything else) “the resurrected plasma of a world unseeing” in conversation. Whether I have to give him $1 or $157, I will be unsurprised. He seems plausibly the type who could utter such a thing with the solemnness of a man revealing to you his deepest mystery and then immediately forget he’d said it all; or just as likely the type to start wearing the phrase on a HELLO, MY NAME IS lapel sticker for six months or so until he tires of it.
I only caught the tail end of russell’s performance, but I do think he was dealt a bit of a rough hand being asked to open the show. He seemed rather shy, and his sort of lyrical minimalism (meandering, impressionistic accounts of quotidian experiences with extremely concise individual lines) usually requires a specific sort of headspace for the listener to fall into it, even when executed well.
Emilie actually read at Discordia’s Rodeo of the Poets event in February of 2024, but one of the downsides of organizing is that you often end up missing large parts of your own shows.
Once again though, it must be acknowledged that at that point she may have just wanted to get the hell out of the Rocket Science Room.
eviscerating. i was trying to think about the different expectation put on poets reading poetry versus a humble writer of fiction like myself reading some selection. i thought that just going slowly and speaking clearly enough to be understood would be good enough, but evidently not for emilie lafleur. i thought that the voice of fiction and character could carry me, but what is poetry if not pure linguistic voice?