Hull Literature Festival 2001 | 8th - 18th November |
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Joan Jobe Smith is Fred Voss's wife and warm-up. Coupledom is big on the menu with this pair of poets. She writes poems about him and he dedicates his books to her. Apart from the first poem, written on the long journey from Long Beach to Hull and similarly epic, Joan Jobe Smith's poems were a delightful surprise, whimsical, quirky and funny. Her doll-like, slightly ditzy appearance, all long auburn curls, dark glasses and generous figure, belies a poet of substance, self-effacing in her admiration of her husband. Joan's support act was a tasty morsel, leaving the audience anticipating more later in the evening. Fred Voss's big thing is work, at least, the workplace. He gathers the material for his poems while on the job as a machinist in an aircraft factory. Some of us just aren't cute enough to make the day job work in quite the same way. Fred did not disappoint, his acute observations of American factory life evocative and vivid. He read as his poems are written, long, unpunctuated phrases, spoken in a lugubrious, rhythmic chant which at times became mesmerising. Although poems which tackled major philosophical issues such as the social value of the work ethic drew respectful applause from some sections of the audience, his most successful poems are those which record the minutiae of human verbal exchange. It is often the final line which twists the meaning and resolves the poem. The surreal humour and construction of visual images through perceptive description are similar to those contained in Dan Fante's writing, following the tradition of Bukowski. The presentation of both Voss and Jobe Smith is more like performance than reading and, as with Dan Fante, it is difficult to imagine the work being read by anyone else. What is it with Americans?
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