I had a wonderful time at the NYRSF reading tonight.
I read "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?", because it is newly reprinted and queer and Jewish and other things I want visible especially these days; I read poems from Ghost Signs and an assortment of uncollected and unpublished poems, concluding with the political one I wrote a few days ago in the aftershock of the election. Jim Freund asked permission to excerpt it for a WBAI show coming up. Of course I said yes. I talked about film noir, Aeolic Greek, radio telescopes, the danger of imagining yourself into the past rather than in it. After the intermission raffle (which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymondegreen won half of), Kij Johnson read excerpts from The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe (2016), which contains strange things in the sea and a small black cat. I will be picking up a copy of my own. I ended up signing my printout of "Vocatio" for her. I talked far too little with Rob Cameron. Merav brought us chocolate and a beautiful little print of a Good Decision Cat; I was glad to hear that her pomegranate trees are inside for the winter. We went out afterward to find real food for derspatchel—I had eaten a bagel with lox and cream cheese before the reading—and fetched up at a Shake Shack, where all the concretes are entirely different regional in-jokes from the ones in Harvard Square. I brought eight copies of Ghost Signs with me and I only have to carry three back.
Now I am going to shower, because we got up to catch the Amtrak Regional this morning at whatschreibergasse rightly calls the ass crack of dawn and I did not manage to do more than doze for about half an hour on the train (mostly in southern Connecticut), though we did fall over stupefied for about two hours once we finally got to Brooklyn and my mother's cousin's house. Right after my last post, we started to pass the salt marshes, fox-colored brushes of saltgrass and plates of soft pewter water in a luminous mist. In New London, I saw a red-and-black cargo ship called the Geneva Venture being loaded or unloaded beneath what I thought were four canary-yellow derricks on the dock, which turned out to belong to the ship—a bulk carrier—herself. The internet informed me she sails out of Hong Kong. I like trains. I like ships at sea. I like New York City, which is not my home, but which has always been very good to me. I like other people's words and I like that I write my own. These things are important. These things are especially important when the rest of the landscape looks like lowering dystopia with a chance of apocalypse in the late afternoon.
I need to remember: right now, I am glad to be here.
I read "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?", because it is newly reprinted and queer and Jewish and other things I want visible especially these days; I read poems from Ghost Signs and an assortment of uncollected and unpublished poems, concluding with the political one I wrote a few days ago in the aftershock of the election. Jim Freund asked permission to excerpt it for a WBAI show coming up. Of course I said yes. I talked about film noir, Aeolic Greek, radio telescopes, the danger of imagining yourself into the past rather than in it. After the intermission raffle (which
ladymondegreen won half of), Kij Johnson read excerpts from The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe (2016), which contains strange things in the sea and a small black cat. I will be picking up a copy of my own. I ended up signing my printout of "Vocatio" for her. I talked far too little with Rob Cameron. Merav brought us chocolate and a beautiful little print of a Good Decision Cat; I was glad to hear that her pomegranate trees are inside for the winter. We went out afterward to find real food for derspatchel—I had eaten a bagel with lox and cream cheese before the reading—and fetched up at a Shake Shack, where all the concretes are entirely different regional in-jokes from the ones in Harvard Square. I brought eight copies of Ghost Signs with me and I only have to carry three back.Now I am going to shower, because we got up to catch the Amtrak Regional this morning at what
schreibergasse rightly calls the ass crack of dawn and I did not manage to do more than doze for about half an hour on the train (mostly in southern Connecticut), though we did fall over stupefied for about two hours once we finally got to Brooklyn and my mother's cousin's house. Right after my last post, we started to pass the salt marshes, fox-colored brushes of saltgrass and plates of soft pewter water in a luminous mist. In New London, I saw a red-and-black cargo ship called the Geneva Venture being loaded or unloaded beneath what I thought were four canary-yellow derricks on the dock, which turned out to belong to the ship—a bulk carrier—herself. The internet informed me she sails out of Hong Kong. I like trains. I like ships at sea. I like New York City, which is not my home, but which has always been very good to me. I like other people's words and I like that I write my own. These things are important. These things are especially important when the rest of the landscape looks like lowering dystopia with a chance of apocalypse in the late afternoon.I need to remember: right now, I am glad to be here.
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