The Lovejoy Columns

The Peaches and Bats 4 launch party in Portland on Thursday flexed poetry’s ancient muscle as an aide to Mnemosyne. Jesse Morse used sonnet-length anagrams built from the letters in “Eric Chavez” to restore his favorite Oakland ‘A’ from the limbo of the injured list to the Elysium of obsessive fan recall, with the caveat I guess that sports heroes are always just magnified analogues for us. Sam Lohmann evoked broken New Year’s resolutions and landscapes that incessantly negotiate their own disappearance with representation until sky gets remembered as the “gap between smears.” Phoebe Wayne read part of a longer poem made by collaging quotations from articles about Tom E. Stefopoulos, Portland’s small-scale Simon Rodia, who spent his off-hours as watchman in the city’s Northwest rail yards chalking Diogenes and other Greek-like figures onto the columns of the Lovejoy Ramp, which used to thrust Lovejoy Street up over the trains till it was pulled down, in 1999, to make way for the ritzy Pearl. Collage seemed like the perfect technique to make sense of a city continually displacing and replacing its past, so that nothing exactly disappears—all stays somewhere in the akashic cache—but resurfaces in surprising ways, far from its home context. Like blog posts about poetry readings.