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Q. R. Hand Point Arena Performance
Q. R. Hand is a very skinny old man with long tangled black hair and a gray beard. At the Third Thursday poetry reading in Point Arena, California on April 16, 2010, he looked like an old hippy one cut, maybe, above homelessness. He got a nice introduction from the first invited reader, Bill Bartnaw, who has published Hand's latest book of poetry, whose really blues. I meditated on the virtue of patience, which I have found to be hand for certain poetry readings.
Sounds exploded from Hand's head on stage. Was he speaking gibberish? A foreign language? Heavily accented English? His hands and arms flew around, punctuating every syllable. There was rhythm, there were English words I recognized, then whole phrases flowed into my mind. And it was not bullshit. It was communication. It was story and history and fragments of epic. It was a drumming and fifing in human flesh.
It was a time warp. He took us back to the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, to Brooklyn and Harlem and San Francisco's Mission District. He made us feel what it was like for him when a black man, Jackie Robinson, first played baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. He sang, more lyrically, of love and pain and the Beatnik era morphing into the Hippy era.
How I wish I had taken my sound recorder and could share a bit of the audio with you. But you really had to be there; even video probably cannot capture the presence of the Muse incarnate as Q. R. Hand.
You can get whose really blues at Amazon:
But what you really want to do is see Q. R. live. If necessary, invite him to your own poetry event!
