After the Reading

Yesterday's symposium went quite well (why do I hear myself saying this in a British accent?). Lots of good papers on poetry and lit, but of course the high light was the creative section at the end. My friend Jay rolled out the persona he's been working on for the last year or so, and this was the first time anyone got to hear a chunk of it all at once. Man, when he finds an editor who gets it, he is going to sell a lot of books. the stuff is freaking amazing.

Also amazing was, well, me. Yes, my ego is a little overly inflated right now, but seriously, it felt really good, re-e-e-a-lllll-y good, to read those poems. They have been revised, and revised, and revised. I've tweaked line breaks, I've cut stuff out and put it back in, and as I read them out loud all together, I realized there wasn't a thing I wanted to change about them. They are done. (Except one that I think is going to be my first prose poem, but I'm not even sure about that.) And holy crap, what a rush it is to have a room full of people paying attention to me for fifteen minutes! I'm a little shy sometimes, but put a podium in front of me and I want to be a rock star. (Not sure why that isn't the case with my teaching though)

Oh, Rick and Lea were wonderful too, but their writing fills up all the space between margins, which just doesn't get me as excited. Sorry.