Gregarious, Hilarious, Precarious

Last night I gave the "Craft Talk" at It's About Time Reading Series at Ravenna Third Place Books - it was reading #209, I THINK. Featured readers were Murray Gordon, Allen Braden and Gerry McFarland. I was psyched to hear Allen Braden read and was rewarded as were we all. He spent July at a writer residency in downtown Chicago, where I guess it was cooler than in Seattle. I liked his postcard poems and his what he called "Lazy Sonnets." I nodded like mad as I write lazy sonnets too - no iambic pentameter or rhyme scheme for mine. Sometimes I think he stuck with rhyme, maybe all the time so I win for lazier sonnets, some of which I am toying with calling sonnetinas, particularly the two or so that are five syllables per line. Murray Gordon, who came in second in the Bart Baxter Spoken Word competition this year and in 2004 definitely has taken performance poetry to his heart, and beret and cargo pants. He was a kick. Sadly, Gerry McFarland was intensely difficult to hear. His voice was faint, even miked, and the help- yourself refrigerators of pop off to the left went into heavy humming mode so that I was about to check to see if their doors were open. The open mics were fab. My talk will be posted on the It's About Time website in the next few days.

I didn't get feedback on my talk last night because I'd thought the reading began at 7, but it started at 7:30, so I had to sneak out at the end of the last open mic to get home in time to sleep enough to be able to get up at 4:45 this morning to steer a long, long boat with four very experienced rowers in it, all of whom, sans me, will compete at Head of the Charles Regatta next month. A very technical race, I am assured, with eight bridges you cannot pass another boat under and many opportunities to run into other boats, capsize, and generally freak the heck out. I'm told its a race that frazzles the most experienced coxswains. So I'm satisfied that they are telling me the truth when they, Sara and Julia, the coaches, say that I'm progressing well.