Under the glare of lights in a room typically kept dark for performances, David Worthington took the microphone and gave voice to a man who hadn’t been heard that evening — not in person, anyway, in this theater half a world removed from his home in Iran:
I hear the 15th bone snap … a razored stem piercing my mottled skin.
The hooded men retire for evening prayer.
It’s cold and I’ve no letters, no photographs.
You can hear with your eyes and you can see with your ears in this medium. – David Worthington
The microphone faltered, and Worthington, who read his newly crafted poem in a screening room at the Edwards Westpark 8 in Irvine, dispensed with it and walked closer to the front row. Clad in a porkpie hat, a checkered blue shirt and black pants, he projected his voice across the theater, where a few dozen attendees dotted the seats.
I lie crumpled, torn and tossed aside.
Disfigured, coagulating, bloated, shattered and lifeless.
Any tears I shed have long calcified.
Playhouses may be built for theater and clubs for music, but live poetry, by and large, borrows venues created for other means: coffeehouses, art galleries, college lecture halls. So when Worthington, one of three readers at the Silent River Film Festival’s awards night earlier this month, stood before the curtain at the Westpark 8, the setting felt as appropriate as any.
This year, for the first time, Silent River invited poets to view movies and create works inspired by them. Worthington crafted a poem from the festival’s opening film: “Alex & Ali,” a documentary about two men — one American, one Iranian — who found themselves torn apart by the Iranian Revolution and reunited briefly more than 30 years later. Worthington wrote his poem in the voice of the Iranian, who returned to Iran after the reunion and was imprisoned and tortured for dissidence.
Click here for more information.
Links:
