Mikey Corenthal ’13 emerged from the audience, walked to the front of the room with his guitar and after a few moments of preparation, took the stage as Kid Nomad. He introduced the audience to his partner, the “The Historical Discontinuity Machine,” a guitar loop pedal. The pedal allowed him to build other textural material on top of riffs he already played.
“When played correctly, the historical experiential discontinuity machine can distort the experience of historical time,” he explained. And using his discontinuity machine, he layered musical phrases into harmony before belting out one of his “Poems from the Future Written in the Past Tense.” The effect was bizarre and fascinating as he described the year 2051, in which a boy with bat wings was born.
Corenthal was one of the brave members of our student body who performed at Cadenza Live, an open-mic style event held in Coffee Grounds last Friday night. The performances were varied, ranging from poetry recitations to musical performances to a reading of Tupac Shakur’s “Sometimes I Cry.”
Emma Wittenberg ’13 organized the event as one of the three chief editors of Cadenza, the literary magazine on campus. Cadenza was something I had heard mentioned several times since my freshman year, but I wasn’t actually sure the club was still in existence until last spring semester.
“I don’t blame you,” said Wittenberg. “The magazine wasn’t properly publicized until last year, [2011]. My fellow editor, Elizabeth Lee, and I decided that we needed to make some major changes to Cadenza, and our spring issue was a total change from what the magazine used to be.”
The revamped Cadenza magazine, which can still be found around campus, features student written poetry and prose integrated with original student art in a sizeable fifty page booklet. “When we designed each spread, we attempted to create some sort of dialogue between the artwork and the writing on each page,” explained Wittenberg. “Clearly, it does not and should not happen that each piece of art directly illustrates the meaning of the written piece, but we find it to be more engaging to present the work in this way.”
Cadenza Live was organized to promote the magazine (which is currently accepting submissions for its fall issue), and to give students a chance to present their own personal creative works to a real live audience of peers. A guitar duo sang a song about their friend who is paradoxically both a hipster and a bro (a hipster-bro). The a cappella group the Williams Street Mix took the opportunity to perform some of their new songs for this year. And Patrick Bourlett ’15 read a slam poem about what it means to be a man.
In an animated performance, Bourlett first sauntered toward the members of the front row, flirting with them in mock machismo, and later lamented with frustration and exasperation our culture’s strict ideas about masculinity.
“I like to use a lot of body language when I read my work,” he said, explaining how he thinks the performance of poetry can help to focus its interpretation by the audience. “With some pieces, to just read it alone without the performance would be like watching a movie with the sound turned off.”
Wittenberg seems to agree that live events such as this one are a great complement to a literary magazine. “Seeing someone perform a piece that they have clearly put a huge amount of time and effort into is an awesome experience,” she said. “I spoke to a group of students afterwards who felt that watching the other students perform revealed bravery and creativity that they hadn’t necessarily seen on campus before.”
And it did seem to take a good deal of bravery. “It was nerve-wracking,” admitted Bourlett. “I think my biggest worry was that people would misinterpret [the poem]. I try to show my frustration with society [in the poem], and it’s nerve-wracking to think that some people might get offended.”
Corenthal agreed. “I think performing is one of my biggest fears after like nuclear warfare and unrequited love,” he said. “This is the type of thing I hang out in my room doing, but getting up in front of people and performing is a whole different thing.”
That seems to be the biggest issue in prompting people to get on stage for an event like this. Art is personal, and poetry perhaps the most personal art of all. But the campus turned out. There were readings about loss, readings about victory and defeat and readings of non-original works, that were clearly important to the performers (except for maybe the reading of that Tupac song).
One student read the entirety of “Goodnight Moon” from memory, and Wittenberg herself read excerpts from Bob Dylan’s “It’s alright, Ma,” an experience which she described as “liberating.” And Corenthal read a second, perhaps more personal piece from his collection “Mating Calls from an Ecosystem that Runs on Fear & a Flower on the Moon,” which he explained was written for his sister.
“I think that the importance of a literary magazine on any college campus is huge,” said Wittenberg, summing up the goals of Cadenza as an organization. “We only have so many opportunities to express ourselves creatively, and even fewer opportunities to engage in a creative dialogue with one another. Being able to compile artistic expressions from all students and faculty allows us to connect. It sounds cheesy, but being able to read a poem or see a painting done by a fellow student that deals with a topic that I can personally relate to gives me such a sense of confidence and pride in my fellow students.”
