Thursday night could have been a ho-hum reading at IFOA.
Sure, the Lakeview Terrace room was steeped in talent right from the start – John Bemrose read some picturesque passages from The Last Woman, set in Ontario cottage country. Michael Crummey knows how to hold an audience as he described a body being found in a whale washed up on the shores of Newfoundland.
But the second half of this reading deserves kudos for turning this event into a performance.
Describing himself as the only poet of the evening, Jacob McArthur Mooney veered into a less conventional path when he read from his how-to guide/poetry collection The New Layman’s Almanac. He gave us a “love poem to a sociopath” and illustrated the finer points of what it takes to be a geographer. My only beef with Mooney was his odd “poetry voice” where the last word of a verse descended a few notes.
A major contrast to the stand-and-deliver readings was Leon Rooke, a CanLit icon and author of the recently released The Last Shot. “I was going to read a story about death,” he started, “but it’s been a somber evening, so I’ll read something lighter.”
It might have been light but Rooke’s performance was anything but he didn’t read his story How to Write a Successful Short Story, he performed it with the gusto of a spoken word artist. He gestured, he tapped his feet, his wispy hair waved wildly. It was jarring at first – Rooke’s voice boomed into the microphone – but it made for an entertaining nightcap for the event.
And in a passage about an octopus, Rooke twirled his arms around to mimic the sea creature, likely giving the audience one of the more surreal moments at IFOA.[rssbreak]
