April 28, 2008

Drab dawn, though I see from the study window that one white iris and the golden tree peony are in bloom.

Reading at the Black Mountain Museum last night as part of WordFest. I take it that we were not the "major" poets but rather a salute to "local" poets. One tries not to dwell on such distinctions. All the events of WordFest were advertized as free, but the Black Mountain people were charging at the door, and there was a bit of a flap over that. Met Galway Kinnell again. He said he remembered me. I sure as hell remembered him. He looks weirdly like my grandfather now. Many opportunities to reconnect with old friends, especially with AW, whom I’ve always liked but whose life and mine have drifted apart. I saw him leave a reading of mine long ago. Discovered last night that it was because his vasectomy had become infected. Now there’s an image one wishes not to linger over. One of his boys almost died of meningitis. . . I knew nothing. Mistakenly, I take his unlined, boyish face as testimony of his life. Group readings like that bring out the best and worst. We were told we had 5 minutes each. The first reader took 25, and the poems were, with one exception, the worst of the evening. It’s a law that the longer the introduction, the worse the poem. The same man told us the ENTIRE Orpheus story, as though we were idiots, before he read his crappy sequence about it. But, many good things, too. I hope I was one of them. I whittled down my presentation to one poem, hoping to balance things a little. Some lady who was wearing a pharaoh crown (and who had protested the entry fee bitterly) admired it, and I gave her the copy. SM kept telling us how much he loved us. N is such an ass that I expected his poems to stink, but they didn’t. KF showed me the church he bought out in the wilderness.

Turns out that a teacher retiring from the Farmor School in Gloucestershire has the same name as myself. He has worked there since 1971 and was head of English. We could be related. We even look a little alike. The article says he plans to write a novel.