Review: Howl by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs

She calls it Howl, after Ginsberg's 1955 poem, but Teresa Harrison greeted her opening night audience with quiet confidentiality, joking and wrestling with a microphone stand as her accompanist Mark Williams caressed his great bass fiddle, painted in 1960's psychedelica.  She'd set up a cardboard triptych of quotations out in the lobby, witty or gnomic remarks from Charlie Parker, Mae West, Sartre, Keith Richards and many others, a bartlett's of Ginsberg's century.

 

Dark-eyed with her throaty voice and long mane of dark hair, Harrison could have been one of those beat babes back in the 1950's.  Her familiarity with us, the cavernous empty setting of the Blue Theatre stage and the antics with her stage manager and bassist put us into quirky shadows like those of some San Francisco or New York coffeehouse, a spell reinforced by two battered manual typewriters stacked one on top of the other, a hanging square that could have held a picture or a television screen, a cumbersome box of props.  She clutched Ginsberg's book even when she wasn't doing Ginsberg but she looked inside it only once.

 

Not just a poetry reading.  Not a howl but instead an incantation, an updating and a recasting of Ginsberg's stunned, pressed flow of images.  Harrison brings the beat poet's glance and askance right up to the 21st century with numbers of her own.  As the séance began, she placed a chess clock in front of the microphone -- the timer box with two clock faces, two plungers above, one per player, to be swatted down when the chess move is complete and initative is turned over to the opponent.  The conclusion of each piece was marked with a smart slap on the clock, a change in the lighting and a different approach to the word and performance.

 

A small oriental gong.  A reluctant bartender and jug of wine.  Bartender Jon McMahan in a gas mask.  An American flag draped over a suitcase of props that she unpacked. For each object that emerged she pronounced one word of image; ping pong balls, more than a dozen of them, each deftly placed on the tabletop with the place of a disaster: Columbine.  Oklahoma City.  Waco.  They spilled off the edge and rolled toward the audience.  A verbal reel of place names and people, each one a mental hook in American culture.  That worn picture book from Camelot?  "Barrack Obama."

 

Swat.  A stretch of Ginsberg.  Swat.  Her own yearning monologue voicing one side of a conversation via the Internet, including the typed punctuation.  Swat.  The bassist droned, thrummed, resounded like loneliness itself -- sometimes sounding over, sounding out, covering Harrison's words as I leaned forward trying to peel the meanings from the dense-packed phrases.

 

And Howl, of course.  Every word of it, along with other poems from that collection.  The long litany of holy things, persons, moments that would never been pronounced in a church; the recognition of Moloch, the biblical beast-god demanding sacrifices, repeated, identified, named perhaps in exorcism perhaps in recognition.  And the sad lost young men:

 

 

Powerful, inclusive, hypnotic a shaman's revival of an intensity of experience rarely known in our superficial age.

 

Harrison is in Austin tonight, Thursday, two hours from now; on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Blue Theatre; and finally on Sunday at 5:15 p.m.

 

Catch Howl. Be moved.  Before you go out on Saturday night for your own distractions or after you sleep in or go to church on Sunday.

 

Recommended.

 

 

 

 

Review by Ralphie Hardesty for austinist.com, February 3

 

EXTRA

Click to view press release with video montage (1 min. 17 sec.)

Click to view program sheet for Howl with Teresa Harrison

 

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Howl
by Alan Ginsberg, adapted by Teresa Harrison
FronteraFest