I love my publisher, Sibling Rivalry Press, but I am a terrible barker for anything Ive ever made if its being sold at the fair. So when it came time today at 3:00 to go and sit at table 916 at the Brooklyn Book Festival and sign copies of my book that people would hopefully be buying -- even after telling them it was written in that dreaded trick of language called poetry, I was dreading it. I dread most things that have to do with groups of people and particularly anything that has to do with appointed time. And its such a useless fear, over and over again useless, because almost every time, something happens in that appointed time that not only takes away the dread, but replaces it with joy and sometimes actually infuses the joy with the sweetest wonder. People were not rushing to buy my book and the humidity made everybody seem as though they were trying to push the air forward just so they could walk through it. And then, three lovely beings came over and I thought, why dont I just read one of the two boys and one girl a poem, which I did. And I read them a poem called Drinking Money about an autographed photograph my mother had of the lyricist Lorenz Hart that I sold for drinking money. And the boy named Will loved the poem, and the other boy in the group loved the poem, and the girl did, too. And Will had just graduated from Bard College and the other boy from Sarah Lawrence and I had taught at Sarah Lawrence years ago so we were standing in the same daylight for a minute that opened a door for more daylight and behold, Will bought a book and my publisher looked at the whole scene being played out sort of amazed and no one was more amazed than I was because I wasnt really thinking about it. I was just doing it, giving my poem to somebody and moving through the dread of the appointed time and making use of it until it met its wonder. And that was what those three people were seeing, too. That was what Will just paid for. He bought the book to mark the day so he could remember it. A book of poems, as it happened -- written already, but now it will be read with all that daylight in it, and hell hear my voice behind the door into more daylight and the day after that.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 02:36:29 +0000
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