I love looking at the audience members' faces during poetry readings. Here are the types of people you see:
1. The undergraduate student there for extra credit texting secretly on their phone hoping no one will see them there.
2. The wanna-be poetry lover. They usually are wearing odd clothes with a part or large parts of their hair over their eye(s).
3. The bearded man--always there. At some intriguing moment of the reading, he will stroke his beard.
4. The poet groupy. You know, the one that laughs at all the jokes, stays after to buy all the books and gets them signed and then usually heads home, still needing more.
5. The serious poetry aficionado. They are writing words like "split couplet" and "villanelle" in some type of leather bound journal along with a Pulitzer Prize winning idea.
6. Then, there are people like me, the skeptic, wishing I had bought a coffee before I came--yet, leaving with a sense that I was part of something I don't even understand-even if I don't want to.
Remind me to show you a Rodney Jones poem called "The Poetry Reading." I think you have the raw materials to write your own right here.
ReplyDeleteDid you have a spark of recognition, then, when you read Chapter 8 in WP, the part dealing with Whitman?