Jaime started off. Jaime has her poet clothes going. She's got poet presence. It is not just the hearing but the looking you get with Jaime. My sad collection of goofy t-shirts and blazers looks not counterculture but dullsville by comparison. Jaime is shiny. And awesome, as she led off with telling us, appropriately for the holiday, that Jose loves Lucima. We also got some Hot Soccer Mom Action, which appears in the current LIT, and finished up with a long poem that was like The Man from Rio gone Czech. They love too much, those Czechs.
I've worked with Nicole for a while on PBQ, but had never heard her read, so this was a treat. She read from a short story involving a ghost who watches daytime talk shows, a randy husband, and a woman obsessed with home exercise and the possibility of pregnancy. I like the idea of a sarcastic ghost who hangs out in your armchairs. I'm not sure I would deal with it well in real life but the idea is charming. The story met my criterion for excellence: my mind did not wander. Given that I have an attention span that simply cries out for Ritalin, this is rare praise indeed.
Ada Limon followed up with a number of short poems about love "that aren't very loving." She reminded us that love does not make things happen, that repeatedly perforating a post-it with a pushpin might be something, but it is not obsessive, and that tying someone to the railroad tracks does not have to be complicated. Ada's poems are both easy on the listener and interesting to hear: the listener isn't left grasping for meaning, but the meaning that comes is often not the expected or easily plotted one.
Finally, B. J. Ward (not "B.J. War," as in "I know a good way to settle this," as Jen Knox put it) fell in love with groundhogs, Roy Orbison, his wife, and greek mythology. And kind of out of love with the Catholic Church, but this institution, like most institutions, is understandably a cause for ambivalence.
Then I ran away, unfortunately before the Theory of the Femizons (an after-reading performance), as I was wet and sad and starving. So I got on all the many trains, which miraculously decided to arrive exactly as I did all the way home, and bought a can of organic chicken noodle soup. Hooray. Tonight I think I will go to the Battle Hill reading, featuring Eugene Ostrashevsky and Macgregor Card. It's all poetry all the time, baby!
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