Content area
Full Text
HAL SIROWITZ walks up to the lectern, flips through a dog-eared folder that bulges with his poems and, facing the audience, sticks his arm straight out to the side.
"This is my one performance poem, where I move," he tells a crowd that has gathered at the Forest Hills Barnes & Noble to hear his twisted takes on therapy, motherly advice, life and girlfriends.
"Don't worry. I won't move again. I was in London, and someone came up to me and went like that," he says, nodding toward his outstretched arm. "I got nervous. I thought it was a new neo-Nazi salute."
But when the man shouted "Chopped-Off Arm," Sirowitz felt safe. Far from his Queens home in Flushing, he knew he had met a fan.
"Chopped-Off Arm" is Sirowitz' signature poem, and he likes to begin his readings with it: "Don't stick your arm out the window/Mother said. Another car can sneak up/behind us & chop it off," go the opening lines.
Dressed in baggy corduroys, a button-down shirt and black sneakers, Sirowitz, 49, reads his poems of bodily injury, death, his Jewish upbringing and lost romance staring straight ahead, as if hypnotized back to his Long Island childhood.
His 6-foot, 2-inch body sags slightly, as if it had a burden to bear. He recites in a nasal monotone, drawing out each syllable, his voice as thick and slow as honey on a cold morning. It's almost an antiperformance.
But Sirowitz' deadpan delivery and well-timed pauses break audiences up, apparently everywhere. Not only was he a runner-up for Queens poet laureate, but he's become the best-selling poet in Norway.
"Everyone either has a mother or is a mother, and they identify right away," Sirowitz says.
What in New York sounds like the Jewish mother "in Scotland becomes the Scottish mother, in Germany, the German mother."
Says Michael Bergman, a Queens resident who came to the reading: "His style helps. It almost gives him a Woody Allen persona. He says a lot of things that are obvious, but he shines a light on them."
"He's weird," says...