Report back from Billy Merrell + Justin Torres

Thanks to all who packed the room for last night's reading. Here, by request, are the intros again:

Justin Torres:

I didn't intend this exactly, or maybe just not consciously, but this evening's two writers have in common a concern with the complexity of love that lives in captivity, exploring the resonances of being bound or trapped in love. With Billy Merrell, it's romantic exclusivity and marriage, while in the stories of Justin Torres it's childhood, the dizzy encloisterment of living in the child's world, whose terms, rarely explicit but always devastatingly absolute, are set by others--in this case, parents who, while palpably loving, are also by turns childlike themselves and menacing in either their power or their half-absence.

The antics and actions and vignettes of the small boys making sense of the world are entrancing, memorable, plump pie-slices of action and omen. But where I really get lost is in his sentences, these lush furly things in which the breathless, exuberant, overflowed voice of childhood is turned upon the knowledgeable lathe of a writer in command of his craft.

Billy Merrell:

Anyone who is familiar with Billy Merrell in his recent incarnation as mad sonneteer may have wondered whether there's anything he won't put into iambic pentameter. Here, by way of an answer, is a line from his invisible play in verse in progress:

Hey, fuck you. God. I hate this. Drop it. Damn.

This speaks to his interest in the impact of the line and the stress on the stuff of ordinary life and extraordinary love--and in how enormous human events can be boiled down to just a word or two. I think Billy is a didactic poet, which I don't mean in a bad way but notwithstanding his denails there is instruction here, gracefully, sweetly. To a surprising extent for somebody who so overtly pulls from his own experience, his work looks outward. His poems offer morsels to their readers, over and over, like a gardener holding out a bloom or a fruit.