I expect you to read the following with the assumption that you're presently living in Seattle, and perhaps you're interested in art, or Art, as they say. Of course, you don't actually have to be living in Seattle presently to do this. Perhaps you live thirty miles north east of Seattle, or perhaps you once lived there, but you don't any longer. Or maybe you hate Seattle. Or maybe you hate art, or Art. But in any case, as a reader, I know for certain that you're capable of that wonderful thing we know as the suspension of disbelief and to aid you in the process, to add a little verisimilitude to your experience, I'm going to blow some sparkly dust on you that I found just laying about these here interwebs. Don't worry, it's all going to help guide you in the experience. Ready? One. Two. Three.....
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Now, you find yourself on the corner of E Pine Street and Melrose Avenue, walking straight towards a dilapidated brick apartment building standing sentinel at the end of Melrose Avenue. The night sky is clear and it’s unseasonably warm for spring. You smile and nudge your companion, an old friend, a new friend, at this point, these titles don’t matter. When the two of you arrive at the building’s wide oak doors, you realize that the building is, indeed, threatening to tumble over at any moment. Earlier in the week, you had read a newspaper article about a poetry reading inside an art gallery and the directions you wrote down for yourself lead you here, to this place. But is there really an art gallery inside the apartment building? Is it on the lower floor? You can’t tell.The doors are covered in yellow construction tape and Do Not Enter signs. And there’s no way in, but then a man in a sweater vest and a bowtie at the corner of the building beckons you over with a wave of his hand, he’s practically standing in the alley.
Are you looking for Vignettes? he asks. You turn and look over at your friend. You both nod, yes.
Well, he says, the door is broken. I don’t know what kind of door gets broken but this one is. Go in and around and if you run into the landlord, just tell him you’re going to a party. I’m Graham, he says. And you both shake his hand and walk in through the back door.
The skeleton of a Murphy bed stands bolted to the peeling wallpaper in the green carpeted hallway. It smells like vintage cigarette smoke. Or cat piss. Or both, mingling in the air right above the over-polished hardwood banisters. On the fourth floor, you both step out of the elevator confused. Only one door has a doorbell and there’s the sound of a loud party coming from the other side. But there’s no sign, and you’re only on the fourth floor in the first place because of some vague inkling you had had. Neither of you had listened to Graham’s instructions. The back of your neck is hot.
Is this the poetry reading? You exchange a look with your friend, you put your hand on the door knob and then pull away. She’s not committed to just walking in on something that could be something other than what you signed up for, you can see THAT it in her eyes. So this is the girl who went to school in LA and lived in the “ghetto”? you think to yourself. Just then, as they say, the elevator doors open and five frolicking hipsters tumble out and beeline towards the door knob out of which comes all the laughter.
Hey, your friend addresses one of the guys, Are you guys just partying or is there a poetry reading going on in there? she asks.
He shoots her a dirty look.
We don’t differentiate between the two, he says. And you think you would have said the same thing, maybe, if you were in his position.
You slide in between endless flannel sleeves and vintage lace and polka-dot dresses and bare arms linked to young hands holding cans of Pabst Ribbon Blue and Rainier beer. Everyone knows each other. They’re laughing and huddled together and although this is an apartment, it’s also, for tonight at least, an art gallery. And it isn’t just an art gallery filled with work made with some bored/retired Microsoft workers who have taken up watercolor to fill up their time. No, this is an art gallery belonging to the young, the working class. This is a gallery belonging to your generation of artists. You find yourself looking for Gertrude Stein. Obviously, this is the one night of the year when the salon is open to accepting new members, and you had no idea. You thought it was just a poetry reading.
I’m dressed all wrong, your friend whispers to you. Why didn’t you mention the dress code? she asks.
I had no idea there was one, you say. But you’re glad that you’re wearing flannel all the same, though you wish you could inconspicuously tear a hole in your shirt.
You find a back wall. You find a place for yourself and your friend on that wall. You exchange glances, and, in a few moments, it begins.
A thin, spectacled man begins to weave his way through the crowd to a corner and it doesn’t take long since the apartment is tiny and now, he’s not seven feet from where you’re standing. He motions for everyone, except for those on the wall, to sit down where they are on the hardwood floors. Everyone sort-of lowers themselves, grappling for a spot and you realize, you’re stuck because there’s no more space on the hardwood, you’re surrounded by bodies and tight, origami-folded legs. You can’t shuffle your feet anymore, you simply have to stay planted, standing, awkwardly propping yourself up with the wall.
As carefully as a gawky baby heron in a swamp, a woman picks and steps her way through the throng to the corner by the window, which has been designated as the front of the room. You realize who she is, she’s the poet, the poet that you’ve all come to see. She’s all clavicles and thin fabric and unkempt flowing hair. When she speaks, her voice is rough, like a science nerd who has finally gotten the nerve to talk. She stands small above her tiny, paper crane congregation and you notice now that many of those on the floor are cradling thrift-store tea mugs filled with a dark red elixir.
You wish you had a tea mug filled with dark red elixir, too. But instead, you listen to the girl.
The poet is now explaining that seven different artists were asked to respond to six of her poems by creating artwork of their own. A few sketches have been scotch-taped to the wall, they're all in pencil or pen, torn out of spiral notebooks, maybe. There’s another, a mixed media piece that includes a boarding pass and a manila envelope, folded into a triangle and glued to blue construction paper. Somebody painted a handsaw white and hung it on the wall. Then there’s a piece that stands about four-feet high, it’s three hot pink tubes that have been duct taped together into something resembling a half-ass version of the Space Needle. Next to it is a similar piece that resembles a giant boa made out of link sausages. They’re supposed to go together. You have no idea how.
Her poems are all very self-referential. And ironic.
Some of the poems are stories, but they point to nothing. You imagine that this is the sort of poetry a young child might write. If they were on acid.
You listen more. The audience is rapt. They laugh at her self-conscious jokes, but you know, and they know, and she knows, that she isn’t self-conscious at all. This is all very serious, after all. This is art. And you’re all standing in the apartment belonging to Seattle’s own Gertrude Stein, a young woman, a curator, as they say, which magazines have called one of the 50 most influential people in Seattle. You can see her now, actually, standing behind some French doors, cradling her cat, and watching the poet as a room full of her closest friends and strangers are drinking wine from her tea mugs. Her bed has been lost under a mountain of satchels, purses, and camera bags. Meanwhile, you’re trying to figure out if the echolalia in the poet’s poems is pointing to something larger, or if it’s just there for the cadence of the poem, which reads like a radio broadcast where half the verbs are covered by static. You decide that you can’t decide.
And you also can’t help but wonder what would happen if you showed up to your own Writer’s Workshop with poems like this. The thought is enough to make you smirk, that is, if you didn’t find the incomprehensibility of it all so terribly maddening.
Now, she’s reading a poem called “Acorn Duly Crushed,”
Dear stupid forest.
Dear patently retarded forest.
Dear beautiful ugly stupid forest
full of nightingales
why won’t you shut up.
What do you want from me.
A train is too expensive.
A clerk will fall asleep.
Dear bitchy stupendous forest.
Trade seats with me.
The poet goes on, but you’re not listening anymore. Instead, you’re noticing that all the tattoo-covered bare-arms read like a sticker book from some long-forgotten childhood, when you used to keep sticker books, though of course, you never did because the commitment was too much to handle. After all, once you stick a sticker, it’s there forever, permanent. But here you are, surrounded by kids who never faced such life-altering dilemmas. And they have covered themselves with the adult-version of stickers: tattoos, cheap, ubiquitous, trendy. A blue-eyed kitten HERE: lopsided on the back of an elbow, a Band-Aid HERE: on the inside of a wrist, an envelope HERE: on the outside of a wrist, a cupcake HERE: on the crown of a shoulder, an Otter Pop HERE: on somebody’s left calf, and too many anchors to count. Small, portable pieces of artwork, counterfeits of the originals, some which were only meant as advertising ploys, literally etched onto the bodies of their hosts, and for what reason? #YOLO
After twenty-five minutes, the poetry reading ends.
Outside, the amber light from a street lamp pours through cherry blossoms, and you look up into a cloud of now sepia-toned sakura. You walk with your friend to a nearby coffee house, order an Americano, and retire to a secluded booth.
Can we talk about this? she laughs quietly. You notice that she’s holding an Italian soda, you wince, just a little.
Who was that girl? you ask.
She teaches at Sarah Lawrence. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, your friend says. I looked it up, she says.
But, you hear yourself begin to stammer, But it was terrible, wasn’t it? Those poems, those poems were not really good, you say.
Of course they weren’t good! your friend laughs. But that’s the style. It’s like, this new sort of impressionism in poetry. The idea is to be ironic, she says, or something like that, she says.
You look at your friend, your friend who, this year, has been rejected from twenty-seven different Creative Writing programs across the country and abroad. Your friend who's a lesbian and who's was a Gender Studies major and she's supposed to know things.
I’m tired of shit passing as art, you say. I really am. I mean, what was that? you ask.
That? she repeats the word softly, like a mother to a toddler, or a teacher to a student. That was a poetry reading, she says. 
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