blueprints

118 | thomas lux
other than honoring Georgia poets would contradict the spirit of McEver’s
great gift, and no way was I gonna come off to the poets in Atlanta and
Georgia as a gottdamn Yankee carpetbagger! I’m not sure what the Yankee
word-equivalent to a carpetbagger is. Maybe hustler, operator, one unencumbered
by a conscience? So we had the readings at different venues
around Atlanta: the 14th Street Playhouse, I’ve mentioned. It was rare to see
poet’s names on a marquee. Also the aforementioned Actor’s Express, the
Margaret Mitchell House (where I also taught my community class), and
the Academy of Medicine, a historic Atlanta building. People came: 300,
400, 350, 300.
At one reading, Georgia Tech’s president at the time, Dr. Wayne Clough,
and his wife, Anne, attended. It was at the Margaret Mitchell house. Nearly
350 people attended, and it was quite a bill: Leon Stokesbury, a nationally
known poet in the Southern narrative tradition; Judson Mitchell, a widely
known poet and novelist from the Macon area; Kevin Young, then an
emerging young poet, now a powerhouse of his generation; and a duo that
made the bill particularly unusual, Steve and Ronnog Seaberg (unfortunately,
and a great loss to the Atlanta arts community, Ronnog passed in
2007). To describe what they did is difficult, but I shall try. First, picture a
couple in their mid-seventies wearing multicolored acrobatic tights. Steve
makes his way onstage, very laboriously, using a walker. He gets it, finally, to
center stage and proceeds to use it to do a full handstand! This is when you
first notice he is ripped, his upper body about as close to a young gymnast’s
body as a seventy-four-year-old man’s can be. He lowers himself, slowly, in
a movement that looks as though it takes the strength and control of an iron
cross. The crowd is going nuts. Then Ronnog, similarly attired, walks
onstage, climbs onto Steve’s shoulders, and begins to recite her poems.
They’re both acrobats; she’s the poet. She climbs all over him and recites
different poems in different positions, some of which make advanced yoga
look simple. It’s hard to tell whether the poems have anything to do with
the sculptures they make of their bodies, but nobody cares.
I and a few other members of the audience who knew Steve and Ronnog—longtime
performers, internationally, on the alternative art scene—
were concerned they might take their costumes off and perform in the
nude, which they often did. We conferred with them beforehand and
assured them we wouldn’t censor them in any way but that it might be a
good idea if they left their clothes on this time. They did.