Too Much of Something Really Great
The next session of the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 6, with featured readers John-Michael Albert and Ellen Taylor. The Hoot, which is sponsored by the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program, is held at Café Espresso, 800 Islington St., Portsmouth, beginning at 7 p.m. Sign up for the open mike, which begins at 8 p.m.
Mike Albert was the first reader at the open mike of the Dec. 2 Hoot, giving the audience a preview of his featured reading on Jan. 6. The poem he chose, “Too Much of Something Really Great,” from his recently published collection, “Vivaldi for Breakfast,” offers a humorous look at a familiar Christmas symbol, Santa’s reindeer, and draws on one of the great strengths of poetry, allowing its audience to share vicariously in an experience of the author through the skillful use of detailed imagery. We may never see the dolled-up reindeer at Paradiza, but we can visualize a tutu-clad Dancer on point in red toe shoes. Albert’s sense of humor turns his audience into collaborators. He says he has always thought — literally — of a vixen as a female fox. We know a vixen can also be a foxy female, and we enjoy the humor of a reindeer Vixen in black fishnet stockings and too much lipstick. Mike insists on the spelling of “bear-chested” bikers. A bear-chested reindeer really boggles the imagination!
Too Much of Something Really Great
There’s a ceramic reindeer in the window
of Paradiza. She’s wearing a pink tutu, and
all four hooves are on point in red toe shoes.
That’s Dancer. And next to her, all dolled up
in too much red lipstick and black fishnet
stockings is, of course, Vixen. The names
of the reindeer never made any sense to me:
a vixen is a female fox; a comet, a celestial
phenomenon; Cupid, a Roman god — but not
here. When the boutique orders the other six
I imagine Donner and Blitzen, German for thunder
and lightning, will be a couple of leather-
chapped, bear-chested gay bikers. Their dark,
Brando glasses, Tom Selleck moustaches,
and one-sided Elvis snarls will say, “Yeah.
We’re trouble. You wanna come along?” You see,
Santa’s team is a bunch of extroverted outcasts,
each with too much of something really great.
—John-Michael Albert
John-Michael Albert, a singer, choral conductor, and composer, is widely known in the greater Seacoast area as an emcee and participant at poetry readings, editor of the 2008 and 2010 Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire, and author of several published collections of poetry.
— Pat Parnell, Statham