Hello to all. I am blogging from the Apple Store in Manhattan because a) that's what you do, and a.1) now I can have written the phrase " I am blogging from the Apple Store" and meant it.
The lines "The most awful thing / About the phrase 'Every Germinal must have its Thermidor' /Is that one never gets to say so anymore / And really mean it" did not get a laff, even a rueful or despairing one, in Orono, Maine. This filled me with inertia, but the reading was generally a happy one. I felt like my set lasted about 55 minutes but when I sat down Steve's stopwatch was just switching to 30:00. "Perfect," I muttered, forgetting I was still miked with the mobile lavalier, which I suppose means there's an archival tape now in which I conclude that the just-finished set was sans flaw. It was not. But my three poet friends at the University helped me read "Their Ambiguity"; I wish I had Jennifer Moxley's voice, but then I would miss our conversations.
Karen MacCormack's set was hard for me to focus on, but I enjoyed our co-unease taking questions afterward. There was an incapacity to find a comfortable rhythm, and this was itself reassuring, that people could still be legitimately different, and that difference had, along with its discomforts, a negation of the mechanical. Still, it tasted like tin.
Report on the New York reading of French poetry in translation to follow...
[the alarm has just gone off here, either because someone has walked out with a digital camera, or Paris Hilton just walked in]
Posted by jane at March 30, 2004 07:13 AM | TrackBack