Weekend with reading reports

Little sis Camron and her boyfriend Ben arrived Friday. They are drama nerds, by which I mean, they both have degrees in drama--Ben with an emphasis on playwrighting and Camron with an emphasis on puppeteering. They're both just out of undergrad and thinking about grad schools. Ben's checking out playwrighting options and Camron is looking into a puppet program in Connecticut. They're casing neighborhoods and thinking about jobs, and might move up around September or so. We'll see. They have friends here, plus us, so a move would be a hell of a lot easier on them than it was on us! (We laugh about that first year now, but it wasn't too funny at the time.)

Friday night we hit Maggie Nelson's party for Jane at Pete's Candy Store. The book is chunky in an impressive way, and it looks great, with a photo of Jane at 15 on the cover. Maggie read for us a little bit and received hearty congrats from all kinds of poetry peeps including Reen, [expurgated], Brandon Downing, Anselm Berrigan, Erica, et al. Tennessee looked hunky and happy and I realized while we were talking that his book is finally out; gotta pick that up pronto! (One of the stories is forthcoming in LIT 10.)

Saturday I took the Cammi & Beeyun sightseeing--Soho, Chinatown, Little Italy, the East Village, Tribeca, the West Village. I thoroughly wore them out. We must have walked 12 miles.


Squishing the Statue


Hudson River Park


Ben shopping for hats

We stopped for a couple of pints at the Ear Inn, where we made fine art of our butcher-paper covered table and took in the poems of Justin Marks & Malachi Black & finally finally finally I got to hear Ilya Kaminsky after missing three recent readings, including Frequency in the fall. His performance style is somewhat akin to recordings I've heard of Dylan Thomas--musical, almost singing--except of course his accent is much different. He seems to be purposely bucking the natural stresses of the lines--if that makes sense--a syncopated gallop of sound that reflects and at the same time reinterprets/improvises the "score" on the page. Some of that lies in the way he pronounces -eds--danced, loved, etc. He really seems to be enjoying his own poems and enjoying reading them to you--and the effect is completely charming. I'd forgotten to take my copy of Dancing in Odessa with me, so I bought the copy we'd been using to follow along so I could have a signed one.


At the Ear

Last night Camron & Ben saw Avenue Q (and recommend it), while we went and did the Zinc Bar series. Haphazardly and plain hazardously, Shafer led us in a ramshackle round-robin reading that included pirate poems, Mini Kiss poems, Big Confettis, and 8-way free-for-all email collabs. Lots of fun, and nice to see everybody after several weeks of homebody behavior.

Also, we met Emily. Hi Emily!