Poetry Near Princeton

A great day in West Windsor, despite the heat. So many good poets in the audience! So many good moments....

... hearing Maria Gillan tell favorite and new stories about her life and her work...
... reading a poem about my daughter, which I've read in public before, and having the reactions of the audience make it a completely new experience...
... hearing people react with that strange unexpected recognition ("Oh, you're David Vincenti!")
... seeing a Met hat so close to Phillie country...

Unfortunately, the poet who conceived the event was (severely!) under the weather and unable to attend, so here's a poem from Catherine Magia, with my thanks for a terrific afternoon:

ECLIPSE

Somehow we had missed the eclipse
Slow thickening of shadow
Celestial molasses careening across
Smooth white dough, darkening and sweetening

To watch the moon close in my imagination
Curved silver eye; blinking, blinded, and reemerging
A survivor of the sky
A narrowing shutter unable to resist light

I don’t remember the sleeping,
Only the stirring, your isolated movements
How you position your body like a mummy’s
Indifferent as wood, unable to slumber with anyone touching

I dreamed of standing at the doorway
Perpendicular to the moon, elliptical light trickling
Through my bones, the momentary flickering
Of the earth’s silhouette, for a minute, swaying together
Like trees in the wind, an unlikely pair

It will be years before this happens again.

Go here to hear her read it.

Some Time With Where Time Goes

This evening I was in the audience at County College of Morris for a reading from Sander Zulauf's new collection Where Time Goes (Dryad Press, 2008). I've been sitting with my copy since last year's Dodge festival, waiting for an overlap between his reading schedule and a night I could finagle to be free, and how lucky for me that tonight was that night.

Sandy read with a jazz trio, perfect for the tone of his poems (especially when they broke into "Inchworm"!). I wish I could recreate the mood of it here - the humor and nostalgia of both the poems and the songs, the warmth of the room (a wide white space with students' art projects behind the performers). I'm hopeful that bootleg DVDs of the event will be available someday, but for now, I leave you with the last few lines of my favorite poem in the collection, "Uncertainty", a kind of meditation on the observer-effect measurement disturbance frequently bundled with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with tribute to physicist-poet Natalia Zaretsky (who also wrote about it):

(I) wondered whether God is
Uncertain about us,
Whether everybody
Who looks at God
And claims to see God
Changes God
Makes God
Uncertain
To everyone else.

Speaking of Bad Record Keeping...

...how bad is this: I contacted an editor who had asked me for a specific piece asking how to send it, print or post, only to find out that she already had it because I had sent it to her already. Oy.

Embarassing, yes, but I have found the NJ poetry community, despite all the labels it can wear, to be quite generous and forgiving of such gaffes. In this particular case, I'm lucky to have "offended" an editor who has been very good to me over the years - for example, upon hearing a piece I was trying out at an open mic, she stopped me on the way back to my chair, pulled me down into the seat next to her, took the page from my hands, and applied her red pen quite specifically - much to the improvement of the poem.

But as we say in engineering (some of us, anyway): In the failures are the learnings.