Poetry Reading

Last night I went to a poetry reading at the Princeton Public Library. Paul Muldoon (a poet and Princeton professor) read several poems and introduced Kathleen Graber. Muldoon was an old hat at poetry readings--he read a sonnet he wrote last month, a poem that he wrote yesterday in Gaelic (translating individual words and phrases, but not the whole thing), and a song that he co-wrote with John Wesley Harding (who is, I understand, a singer). The song was infinitely clever--it goes on and on about all of the different artists the singer has covered (in charming and poetic groupings varying according to random categories and rhymes), and ends with the refrain, "The only one I haven't covered is you."

Kathleen Graber was much newer to attention (you can't really call what any poet has "celebrity"). She didn't come across poetry in any serious way until she was 35! This gives me much hope for my yet entirely uncultivated desire to eventually write poetry. Her poems are rather long and without a lot of form, but they're both very thoughtful (a sequence that she started out reading from takes the writings of Marcus Aurelius as a jumping off point) and very universally accessible (that same sequence is also tied to her project of cleaning out her basement--who doesn't immediately understand the image of a jar full of buttons?). She likened her own process of writing poetry to fishing--she casts out a line (starts writing a line of poetry) and sees if anything (inspiration) bites. She spent one year abroad as part of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, which looks awesome--the primary requirement is that the poet live abroad for the year (Graber described this as a sort of banishment). Here are several lines from one of the poems that she read (these lines are set at the Wildwood boardwalk, where she used to sell music):

"Last night at work, before I knew it — while I was busy
selling a t-shirt, the one with the glow-in-the-dark skeleton
in the electric chair, to Canadian tourists — an addict convinced me
to keep an eye on his six year old son. Slurring something
as simple as Don’t let him go nowhere, he turned & stepped
into the congress of night-strollers on the boardwalk"