read at a poetry event here. For a while I was worried we would have more sponsors than guests. The major players were the Iowa International Writing Program, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, and the Institute. The first two are sending poets and writers on global tours. The embassy brought them to us. The Institute paid for the pizza.
Christopher Merrill is the director of the Iowa International Writing Program.
Nathalie Handal edited two anthologies of contemporary Middle Eastern and Eastern poetry,
and Bob Holman started the Bowery Poetry Club. They were escorted by two diplomats who arrived with "Forty Years of Friendship" banners that they erected before the reading.
After days of censorship, the poets were relieved—Handal was thrilled—to hear that they could read whatever material they liked. Merrill, the patron of the group, kicked off with a poem inspired by Jorie Graham. He opted for works that were very long, and his final poem, inspired by the line "Our last mojito in Havana," had a humid, tropical density. Merrill's soft-spoken, reserved reading style is so mellow it's lulling, but it doesn't conceal the energy the poems have on the page.
Handal treated us to a poem she described as "PG... but R here" and an a cappella rendition of a song inspired by Lorca and Leonard Cohen. She had a compelling energy. One student told me, "I loved thinking about whether she was having an affair with any of the other poets she was traveling with."
Holman is an actor who plays a garrulous, self-reflexively snobbish role—"You translated Pessoa!?"—which kept us laughing all night. He gesticulated from behind his buffalo horn glasses and read a poem about 14-year-old Picasso that ended "Every morning I wake up, give myself a big kiss, and paint a masterpiece. Then I have a coffee," but my favorite line was, "No more! No. More." (Listen to the whole poem below.)
Afterwards, I confessed to Merrill that I was accepted into the Workshop. This secured me an invitation to dinner at the Holiday Inn. (P's Pessoa translations had a similar effect.) In our group of ten, at least five ordered Osso Buco—poets hungry for marrow. P asked the U.S. diplomat—who had invited along his 300 lbs. (140 kg) Egyptian boyfriend, Hashish—if he had kids at home. It startled me that the view of the goings-on could be so different from across the table. On our end, the discussion centered around whether P should get a live-in nanny for his children, a housekeeper, or, in the extreme case, shoulder on as is. Between bites of beef tips, the diplomat and I talked of our mutual hometown: Erie, Pennsylvania.
Here's a full (though muffled) recording of the reading:
Buy Bob Holman's latest.
Buy Nathalie Handal's latest.
Buy Christopher Merrill's latest.
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| Chris Merrill |
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| Nathalie Handal |
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| Chuck Close's daguerreotype of Bob Holman |
After days of censorship, the poets were relieved—Handal was thrilled—to hear that they could read whatever material they liked. Merrill, the patron of the group, kicked off with a poem inspired by Jorie Graham. He opted for works that were very long, and his final poem, inspired by the line "Our last mojito in Havana," had a humid, tropical density. Merrill's soft-spoken, reserved reading style is so mellow it's lulling, but it doesn't conceal the energy the poems have on the page.
Handal treated us to a poem she described as "PG... but R here" and an a cappella rendition of a song inspired by Lorca and Leonard Cohen. She had a compelling energy. One student told me, "I loved thinking about whether she was having an affair with any of the other poets she was traveling with."
Holman is an actor who plays a garrulous, self-reflexively snobbish role—"You translated Pessoa!?"—which kept us laughing all night. He gesticulated from behind his buffalo horn glasses and read a poem about 14-year-old Picasso that ended "Every morning I wake up, give myself a big kiss, and paint a masterpiece. Then I have a coffee," but my favorite line was, "No more! No. More." (Listen to the whole poem below.)
Afterwards, I confessed to Merrill that I was accepted into the Workshop. This secured me an invitation to dinner at the Holiday Inn. (P's Pessoa translations had a similar effect.) In our group of ten, at least five ordered Osso Buco—poets hungry for marrow. P asked the U.S. diplomat—who had invited along his 300 lbs. (140 kg) Egyptian boyfriend, Hashish—if he had kids at home. It startled me that the view of the goings-on could be so different from across the table. On our end, the discussion centered around whether P should get a live-in nanny for his children, a housekeeper, or, in the extreme case, shoulder on as is. Between bites of beef tips, the diplomat and I talked of our mutual hometown: Erie, Pennsylvania.
Here's a full (though muffled) recording of the reading:
Buy Bob Holman's latest.
Buy Nathalie Handal's latest.
Buy Christopher Merrill's latest.
1 comments:
UM.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I'm glad those applications I watched you mail produced such a fine outcome!
This event, and dinner, sounds like it was wonderful. Congratulations on that, too.
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