LitCrawl Readings and Report
Woke up this morning to a beautiful fogless San Francisco morning (I got a really cheap rate at a downtown hotel, and they put us on the 31st floor in a tiny room with a great view of the Bay and the Golden Gate bridge.)
Yesterday we rolled into the city – after a beautiful drive through harvest-ready vineyards – during the exhibition of the Blue Angels, which means people driving their cars kept swerving into us because they were watching the planes instead of the street. It was Fleet week, so there were crowds of sailors in uniform everywhere as well. (It made me think of my little nephew, Dustin, who is serving in the Navy now down in Florida.) It was a perfect 70-degree-sunshiney day, and the Mission District seemed charming with its restaurants and shops rather than scary (maybe it was the abundance of writers everywhere?)
My first LitCrawl event was the Small Desk Press reading at Adobe books, a really small and dingy but interesting book store. The space was kind of awkward for a reading, but I really enjoyed meeting the folks there, especially Lizzy Acker (who is the namesake for the Monster Poetry contest I won and whose upcoming book I am looking forward to reading) and Marisa Crawford, who happens to be a Switchback Books author (Rock on, Brandi Homan!) And thanks to my friends who came out to see me 🙂
The second event was at Muddy’s Coffee Shop for the Eleven-Eleven/Fourteen Hills reading. I felt pretty good about this reading (unfortunately, Glenn forgot to turn on the video recorder, or I’d have a nice YouTube video for you) and sold a couple of books, which is always reassuring. The space was nice and big and the crowd was friendly and upbeat. (Also, the other readers had a robot-thing going on in their work that dovetailed nicely with some of my new poems.) The Fourteen Hills editor-girls – especially Hollie, Leanne, and Kelly – were really great – I wish I could bring them with me up to Seattle! They really know how to set up readings. I’ve never been to a Fourteen Hills event that wasn’t a lot of fun. And I came away with back issues of Fourteen Hills and Eleven-Eleven.
Then it was on to the After Party at the Blue Macaw, which had a DJ, a hugely crowded bar, and was the first place I’d ever seen people turned away from a lit party (I watched a big crowd of drunk twenty-something guys get told “You’re not readers? Then you can’t come in. And there were bouncers. Bouncers!) I only stayed an hour or so, but got to talk to a lot of fun people, and got some good feedback on the new Robot Scientist’s Daughter poems I had read – one guy even stopped to talk to me about Oak Ridge and tell me a creepy Disney-robot story that is definitely going to make it into a poem. I can’t reveal everything about it, but it involves an animatronic Lincoln and a death waiver.
Today we’re planning to hit Union Square (I want to take a last look at my favorite art gallery, Jenkins Johnson) and the big Impressionist show from the Musee d’Orsay that’s up at the DeYoung in Golden Gate Park. Then home to pack, because we’re starting our ten-day countdown – to Seattle! Which means my brains will probably be mush for the next two weeks.
Goodbye, San Francisco and friends! I’ll miss you!
Back home at last after a whirlwind of poetry, family (almost every member of my family drove into Chicago to see me for at least one day from Cincinnati, and all seperately, so you can imagine the fun) and quick tourist-ing (Field Museum with its giant dinosaurs and the Art Institute, Millenium Park in the rain, driving around Lake Michigan when the waves were ten feet high.) I didn’t get to do any shopping, due to my very low current freelance income, which was a shame, because the shopping in Chicago looked fantastic. In every window, another temptation. On the last full day I got to have lunch with Brandi Homan (whose lovely Dancing Girl Press chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is very worth checking out) and coffee with Jessa Crispin (who runs Bookslut and, check it out, was named one of Wired Magazine’s Hottest Geeks of 2005.) and a friend of hers who is a professional confectioner. Doesn’t that sound like a great job?
Still kind of under the weather with the cough and head thing, for which I have now been on antibiotics for, what, like fifteen days now? Dang. Hard to shake. But we made chicken soup with fennel and onion at midnight last night on our arrival, and are now working on a large pot of homeade beef vegetable stew, to be taken with orange juice. If those things can’t cure me, well, there’s no help except to move to a warm, sunny, dry climate.
In other poetry news:
I came home to a really nice issue of Eleventh Muse, which included many fine poems (that admittedly I have only skimmed) and my poem “Rescuing Seiryu, the Blue Dragon.” I ended up liking the poem when I read it again, it seemed to have not been written by me at all but by some alter ego. Isn’t it weird when that happens?
Now, I seriously have to recover before the next two readings – Saturday the 21st and Monday the 23rd. I’ll be under my comforter, watching 30 Rock and Colbert Report recordings, until then.
Today, I’m re-socializing myself by going to Peter Pereira’s new book reading and party, which should be wonderful, and I’m meeting up beforehand for a birthday lunch with a friend (her birthday, not mine) which should be good as well. I always need a little living-in-a-cave-by-myself time after big social weeks, like AWP or the school residencies. I swear I’m an extrovert, I just need breaks in between extroverted events.
So, onto writers and their portrayal in film. I loved the tremendous “Stranger than Fiction,” which features an author obsessing over how to kill her main character, a vulnerable and subtle Will Ferrell. Then I fell into the movie “Music and Lyrics” (Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore,) a much less tremendous film, which features a foetry nightmare character – a girl who seduces her powerful professor (a la David Lehman) at the New School to get her poems published, (or so the professor says) and when he dumps her and writes a thinly-veiled fictional account of her seduction, she has a nervous breakdown and becomes “charmingly quirky” (except the script allows the quirks to come and go like cats in the scenes. There’s no continuity or integrity about the character.) Then she’s redeemed by writing the lyrics for a pop-tart’s hit single. Nothing like the music business to clean up the dirt left by the poetry biz? LOL.
Post-AWP Reading:
I’m reading Simone Muench’s Lampblack & Ash, which is painfully pretty and powerful, like walking in stilletos over every word, and Brandi Homan’s chap, Two Kinds of Arson, which I read all in one sitting and then promptly wrote a poem afterwards (always the sign of good reading.) I even envisioned a string of poems about Rapunzel. So, my advice: read both books, then get to your writing! I also read the lastest issue of Sentence, which had some wonderful bits by Margaret Atwood and a bunch of fascinating stuff. It’s not just your typical lyrical surreal prose poem kind of writing. A nice diversity.
I may get in trouble for mentioning it (he explicitly asked for no reviews!) but Jim Behrle’s chapbook, She’s My Best Friend, is fun reading, as well as beautifully produced. OK, that’s all I’m saying.
(Music: Reasons to Be Beautiful by Hole)
