Home from the Reading…

It was small but good, as , , and can attest. Mostly an older crowd, mostly telling stories rather than poetry. One fellow told a story about being in the Air Force Survival program at Fort Devens, which has apparently been turned into a retirement community for the state of Massachusetts. The host Libby Frank told a story about the winner of the 1946 Boston Marathon, who came from a small village in Greece. Another gentleman sang the original song about Sweeny Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, before Stephen Sondheim got his hands on the old rascal. Another gentleman told the tale of a “French Bataan Death March”, consisting of a trip from Paris to Clermont-Ferrand via Vespa that left us in stitches.

For my own part, I opened with The Heron. One woman gave an audible little gasp, and I think she saw the heron wings. I love energy work while doing poetry. Then Judgment of Paris, followed by Engine Trouble, and the haiku from last winter’s Book of Days. I then did Midas, as several folks recommended, and concluded with The Knitting Lesson. I sold three CDs and gave two away to people who offered me other readings.

So, on 28 October 2004 I’ll be appearing in someone’s kitchen for a reading to a knitting and string-craft group (guess it’s time to memorize Athena and Arachne and Making Bracelets, and at some future and unspecified time I’ll be appearing at a reading in Waltham, where no doubt I’ll do Watches.

I began Book of Days again, writing a haiku a day in a Molskine notebook, three to a page. It’s not actually a Molskine notebook — it’s a Molskine Japanese Album. The pages are arranged in gatefold order, so they’re strung together like a folding screen or a scroll, one page joined to the next. There’s only 48 pages or so, which means I’ll get 144 days into the book. That will get me to mid-to-late January, I expect. I may stop earlier than that, and begin a new book on January 1. I have three of these books in “storage”, so to speak, so four months to a book works out just about right for creating a year-long cycle. We’ll see.

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