 Well, good evening. Welcome so much. Welcome. Thank you for coming. We're so happy. I'm Sarah Lipton. I'm the director of the senior center here and as a fellow member of the queer community and thrilled to have this gathering this evening and we're really looking forward to having our poets read. We have another one of these coming up on November 4th. So come back for more. And I'm delighted to introduce who's the co-founder of the Rainbow Umbrella group. Come on up. We have special COVID precautions for this evening. Welcome everybody. On behalf of Rainbow Umbrella of Central Vermont, I think I can speak for them. We're happy that you're able to join us and we're happy to be partnering with the senior center for this event tonight. As I'm sure you all know, Audre Lorde famously said poetry is not a luxury and that is certainly true. It's urgent. It's elevating. It's energizing and it's fun, and I know you all know that. So let's get down to it. Each poet is going to read for 10 minutes. We'll have a 10 minute Q&A. Oh, and thank you to Matt Wilson for organizing the Zoom connection and welcome to Alberto from Orca Media. So each poet will read for 10 minutes. Then we'll have a 10 minute Q&A and afterwards we'll have a book signing. There are some books available for sale at the table there. So let's start with the first reader if we could. Ava Zimmit is more or less a lifelong artist coming of age in the theater world, adding a number of interdisciplinary years in the study of fine and performing arts. She has two books published, Lucy Dancer, an illustrated children's book, and The Lost Grip poems, a push-park prize nominee. Her poetry can also be found in various journals along with her illustrations. Her restorative justice work and all other aspects of her life benefit from the training and practice of Argentine Tango. Born in New York City, she now lives in Vermont, U.S. Welcome Ava. But it's convenient because Tango is an improvised art and life is so improvisational. And so I'm gonna I'm gonna read a few poems and preface it with kind of an overarching theme of the poems that I chose, which is that we're we're all on a path. We don't necessarily know what it means, but it's informed by where we've been, where we are, and where we're going. And I have a one of my kids used to get lost all the time and when they got old enough to go out by themselves and drive after that, they'd always ask directions, and I was like trying to orient. This is a young adult, and I landed on this little exercise, which is to ask themselves, where am I and where am I going? Any time you get lost, where am I? Where am I going? And then I can add to that where have I been, and I realized it was a super kithy, like life life view. Because we So sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes we don't know how our experiences are related, but then they are. So the anyway, the first poem I'm gonna read is not from the book. Most of the stuff is new poetry, but I might read if I have time, I'll read one from the last script, and all of our books are over there. So this one's called webbing. Rips, tears, and dew drop refractions. Excellent symmetry and imbalance, hanging from a thread, stronger than steel, a home, a trap, a sight to see, a place to be. I write a lot of short form poetry, so I didn't want to hit you with too many haiku. I have one haiku sequence that that I brought with me. Anyway, the next one is also, you know, a reflection on finding yourself suddenly in a place you didn't expect. This one's called next stops. Oh no, not me composing poetry at a self-serve station over hearing truck drivers laughing over cargo, one on shift, the other done, going home, revs motor, muffler, screaming, a festive touche. My pen suspended over the paper to write some bad trope, and now a record of tragedy, a witness of tragedy. What will the cargo's next stop be? And ours. It's an illusion to trafficking. This one is called let's go home now. Let's go home in the direction of the waxing moon and through the mist. I am the mist's lover. I enter it and it strokes my skin. Longer than a haiku. This one's a little longer. And also, this is one that might be on a where have I been title. But the title is that rain. Who are you that rain reminds you of London? It reminds me of loneliness cured by some stretch of my imagination then consumed, leaving me desperately hungry and even thinner. That little extra squeeze you give my hand, you think it means something mutual, but it doesn't. And teared back up as if giant granite steps rain on the roof of the car rain as I slept and woke and waited for my mother to come back. I heard on the radio of the, I guess they were talking about generational trauma that children born from mothers who were pregnant during Sandy Hook. So we, and they're looping around to it. So that was basically a poem about that. We've all had mothers. This one's called Lenticular Jew. Anybody need a refresher on what lenticular means? Great word, though, isn't it? Lenticular, lenticular. It, you know, the before digital billboards and stuff, they had billboards that if you're on the highway and you're driving by and it shows one image as you're at one angle of the billboard. And then as you turn, it's like a different image. How did they do that before digital? It's because they're they're on little like corrugation surface. And that is called lenticular. So lenticular Jew, nearly breathing on its own, that soft and warm, yeasted bread with the glossy egg glaze, the bread, the lies, me spared to live by a stone wall with little gaps of light and air, in effect, a giant tilt card billboard, different image, different lens from where you are. And where am I? As lately as today, I'm what? A bit further open, inviting pollinators and other allies. A bit further on, slowly as lichen grows, invisible holds in a rock face ascent, a stop motion time warp of disaster when the weapon has fired, but the pain has not hit. The bridge of death tread, but not crossed. The atmosphere between discovery of a lie and what lies beyond. Mama made that bread in a butt pan and frosted it like cake. Code, I didn't know, was ciphered until it broke one day, sign of signalling a birth of sorts. Tadara's deli sold their broccoli brape and garlic dish, good salami and cheese, daily baguettes and that bread only available on Fridays. I asked why they said it's challah as if I would understand the story. Whole and ought to have known. And eventually I did come to know my lineage of survivors tilting the card this way and that, seeing the bigger picture. All right, this is some comic relief. Do I have time still? I mean, a minute or two. OK. Great. OK, speed read this one, because it's funny. Choking at the bra store in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the matrons of Little Odessa. Anybody know Little Odessa in New York City? OK, right. OK, the matrons of Little Odessa are having a good day, I think. And I make it that much better when I walk in all young and prenuptial. Why do you want? What do you want it for? Dressing room curtains hurl open, jiggly arms, breasts, jowls and bums in black lace and straps. Their shamelessness shames me. She needs something sexy. They holler and hoot. I swear they place bets with sparkling eyes. What are they rooting for? The shopkeeper elbows me behind a curtain. This is a few years ago. It's like where I've been. Poem and tosses bras at me with pretty things all over. I've got one on now and she joins me pinching a little here and there because it doesn't fit. I'm crying, but only a little, I think. Is this cotton? You're choking. Studies went on. I am choking on chattel fealty on the deal I am about to make. My mother-in-law to be sitting right outside the dressing room waiting. They are joking with an accent. Matron one, she needs something sexy. Matron two, it doesn't matter. Matron one, it always matters. She had the last word, all right. It rang in my head for years. Joking. That's how the Russians pronounce a joke. OK, this one to end. It's a sequence of haiku. And I've named them, I've named this form of poetry erotiku. I knew it when she touched me. Time and not time. I became a peony. Blooming petals, smooth and wet with dew. Moontide draws the ocean in my body, even under this roof. That's it for me. Keep your questions. Thank you. Our next reader is Kim Ward, a poet, playwright, director, theater producer and visual artist who founded the Vermont Playwright Circle shortly after receiving her MFA in performance poetry from Goddard College in 1998. Her poetic play, Angel in the Fire, was a winner of the 1990 Vermont Theatres and Theater Artists Playwrights Showcase and was accepted into the last frontier festival in 1999. Other plays of hers have been produced by Moxie Productions and as part of the Burlington Fringe Festival, as well as through VPC's Ten Fest. She has had poems published in the Green Mountains Review, Metropolis, Circumference, Vermont Times for Poem City, Montpelier and in Burt's Song, poems from Vermont Vol. 1 and 2. And her poetry has been included in Poetry Alive, Montpelier, Vermont on several occasions. And she was happy to win the Jeff Hewitt Anything Goes Poetry Slam last April. So let's welcome Kim. I'm going to stand back a little because I'm used to not using a microphone. But if you can't hear me, let me know. I never have a plan when I'm going to read. I usually love to listen to what people before me read and it always kind of triggers, oh, maybe I'll read that poem. So this is a quite an old poem of mine. It's called Instructions. Do what? Read again later, the label says. Turn instructions upside down, then read twice, bend, lift. Give one look, not two, and you will see a married woman just loosening her corset and letting her hip bones out so her man can enter her and claim her. Ignore instructions one through D if you would like instead to form your own opinion. Pull the ripcord to continue and remember, always keep your stilettos inside the raft as you descend from the plane and never land on astroturfing stilettos at all. Avoid thinking at all times. Avoid all thoughts of thinking or turn instructions one quarter turn, jump to the left side of the raft, cartwheel twice in your yellow flower dress, letting all of the passengers see your underwear and tabulate how many of all genders looked. Multiply by three and sidestep the two-step Texas bar to enter bisexual heaven. I wrote that many moons ago when I was coming out. And another note, a very new poem I've written is called Not the Wind Beneath Your Wings. I'm not the wind beneath your wings. I'm the grass ground up beneath your cleats. I'm the ball hit by your bat. The bug on your windshield going splat. You use and you use and you're used and you abuse. You never seem to know when to put on those walking shoes. But boy when it is time to focus on me or your songs or your mother, your brother. It's me. I will not go there. I must be free. I guess we'll continue with the not. It's called Jabba the Hutt on a platform shoe. It's not that I was suicidal but I wasn't me. I was squeezed into this little box, the only box I was allowed to be in. Like Jabba the Hutt on a platform shoe oozing from the edges. And when I looked at you, all women's curves and lip and smile, I oozed from that box until I was overflowing by the mile. This is what happens when you read on your tablet, right? This is called Glad Klingwrap. And if everyone ever uses Glad Klingwrap, imagine the labels that are on the side of it. And I definitely wrote it during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Glad Klingwrap. Or I'm happy to wrap you tightly in plastic just to have a night of safer sex loving. Touch those spots we avoid. Stick close to this hot mingling spot of the place to make my juices flow under that marble exterior I keep for show. I'm easy to handle, you know. It's crystal clear who's at the wheel when you take a roll of Glad Klingwrap out of the dresser drawer. It stretches top between us, that caution, caution on the side of the box. And when you finally tear at the box with impatient teeth, I know this spot holds the wrap in place for next use. That cling forms between fingers and flesh to keep food fresh. And you are that. I store your guy as hips in a safe place, as though it's not the touch stick spot I've dreamt of my whole life, not the raw skin to skin touch. This easy to handle crystal clear polyethylene body is rising to meet your too hot to handle finger sandwich whose Janice Joplin figure smile holds me and raptured even under the thick wrap of Glad touch stick spot sex. Yeah, her roommates did not know what to make of that. They were two boys, so they were like, what are you doing with Klingwrap? I promised myself I would look at the time, but just do this if I keep going too long. This poem I wrote after realizing that Gilgamesh has no women who are named. So the harlot is named, but her name means harlot, so she didn't have a name even. So it's called Mistaking Myself for Invisible. It's been so long since anyone called me by name, even I have forgotten. I wake to a full moon careening overhead like a loosed cart on a steep hill and realize even my dead lovers did not see past my plump flesh to the deep crevice that holds my heart. In the wild city, the men flock to me, a river of hummingbirds exposing the delicate undersides of their throats dipping into my nectar again and again to rejuvenate themselves. Now the wide world has taken them, dried their flesh and scattered their bones. The city stands empty, gates flung wide. There is only the blank stone wall and the sunset burning through it. My soft, weeping mingles with the sibilant echo of a whispered name I may never remember. Oh, and this one. So when I did go to Goddard, I wrote this huge, they said you had to write 65 pages of poetry, which I had never done. And because I'm a playwright, I decided to write a play about three generations of women in my family surviving alcoholism and addiction in their partners. But amongst a lot of that was me trying to figure out how to talk to my mother about who I am. So this is called Mother I Dare Not Ask You. Why I could not seem to love only men, to swish my square hips just so, to leave behind my favorite boots for a pair of your immaculate pumps. You would not listen if I told you I don't believe the skirt makes the woman. I'm not attracted to that great hairy lump of muscle across the room that winks and calls me sweetie when he orders a drink. I'm intrigued instead by the small boned man, by the piano with the delicate fingers who plays the cello and smiles sublimely. I'm all flutter when the waitress at table five with the shaved head and combat boots winks her pierced eye at me and says she's dying to taste my dull unpainted lips after hours. I don't know, I don't, I know you don't believe in my search for the perfect hybrid, that you don't want to release me from the grip of your ideals. I find myself covered with each bit of praise you have ever given. Each nod or no has stuck to me like starfish, splayed over the cheekbones until your portrait was complete and only my frightened eyes peered through reflecting your identical face until now. Now I have gone out to pick the parts of my gender from the air like bubbles they float just out of reach as my gender climbs out of me in a twisting dance each might burst like soap bubbles burst in the air or solidify as glass cools into Victorian witch balls so that I know if I place them in the window they will deflect the worst of the storm while still attracting the lightning I long to feel on my skin. Let me look at, okay last one. This is one of the poems I used during the poetry slam. It's called Eating at the End of the Empire. There's a lot of Star Wars references in my poetry. Geekmuch. They're telling me to give everything up. Fried foods, their aromas wafting like waltzers in the air. Chocolate, it's loving lips licking my own for hours after eating. Carbs, those toasty creatures whose gluten is my bitch on most occasions. Even creamy dressings, which go on the salad vapor port I should turn to like a new friend. A blind date, a sweet lover whose arms should slap the soft palate of mine with a witty jaunt on the two-step dance floor. But I say no. If I am going to eat at the table of the Conqueror, the Emperor, the sunset golden piled table of the Empress, I am going to do it right. Gobble like a Roman wife, savor it, pull it through my teeth, chomp, lick, laugh and spit and even use the vomitorium should the need arise. So I might live, damn it, if I'm going to live. Staring at the odd starfruit squash and quema piles and wondering what the hell to do with them all. Or worse, cook them only to peck at and then shove in the dark crisper drawer where they will make new play dates with mold. That hairy guy who keeps inviting himself over and over and over again so that like some court jester staring at the Empress's toes as she shuffles through the throne room in her rumpled robe, I finally give up the ghost and just go out into the streets to dumpster dive whatever slop and eat it until I need to puke it all up and start over again anyway. Thank you, Kim. Our next poet is Linda Quinlan. She has been published in Sinister Wisdom, The New Orleans Literary Review and Black Mountain Press among other publications. Her book, Chelsea Creek on Sale to your left or right won the Wicked Women's Poetry Prize. She was poet of the year in Wisconsin and has a poem coming out in Vermont poets I have to add. She's one of the organizers of this event tonight and a co-founder with an audience member and me of Rainbow Umbrella of Central Vermont. So welcome, Linda. Well, I have two things to warn people about. One is my allergies are driving me crazy. So if I sound a little... and go... I hope you understand. And, you know, people have said my poetry is very dark and it is. But I hope to have at least one poem at the end which will be somewhat of a comic relief. So, here we go. This is a poem about my cousin Danny who was the son of my favorite aunt and this is called Baby Sitting Danny. Danny and I met for the last time at a Fifth Street bar two doors down from his mother's old aunt where I ran numbers for her to the book he joined across the street. My hand reaches for him then retreats. He is a tear waiting to fall on my cheek. I taught him to steal at Woolworth's. He emptied his small pockets and delivered his haul to older girls he wanted to please. Balloons, eyeliners, candy lips that bled into our mouths. His mother was 43 when she was found dead. Empty pill of bottles beside her. No last words in an apartment above cat's bagels. I wanted to steal something for him to give him his mother's laugh the way she held a martini a cigarette. I paid for his beer and offered nothing more. He lagged behind me my car door opened and shut. Six months later he said, beer bottle on the floor California sun on my face when I get the call a gun in his hand no suicide note a long picture of his mother on the night stand. So and then I was going to read since this is a LGBTQ event this is a poem about my first erotic awakening and it happens to take place on my parents owned a camp in an evangelical campground if you can imagine and so this is a poem about that campground for Jesus at my parents lake house Betsy and I paused by the bay a crow has warned has warned the others we are here early morning intruders deniers of tasty morsels the sun has rotted this piece of heaven where bikinis aren't allowed and drinking is forbidden how the hides his rum bottles in the trunk of the car I envy their easy belief knowing who to hate and who to wealth still the landscape has magic a superstitious touching of toes to sand the ritual of my diving right in her slow and careful walking blood sisters at 14 the touching of fingers a timing of cycles among all the other teenagers on the beach no one else mattered we were heathens and ever once got saved at the chapel I became formless by the fire pit and delighted in burning marshmallows with pitch fork sticks we plunged into the flames sometimes I play devil's advocate but not in this place a place that captures the hateful church bells and the lingering sound of preachers preachers and then I was going to read this poem called Father Tom he was a priest at St. Rose in Chelsea 45 years after Faze's death Tommy finds me on Facebook his sister perched behind familiar eyes a distant cooing of someone long gone he was 12 and I 14 when I taught him to french kiss I had totally forgot what he remembered as divine he asked for pictures of her and I had many teas brown here black nylons a look of toughness we all flaunted in one she's standing beside Diana switchblade in her pocket us girls talk about the mental hospital how we scam to break her out give her back her daughter stolen from her arms and moved to New York City her daughter is 55 now brought up in some suburb I hope she is loved has a fuck you swagger and loves Italian food neither of us cries until a weeks later in my car the old station plays Tommy can you hear me I was a pinball wizard at Revere Beach Faze cheered me on and insisted we hang by the Himalaya raising our voices towards the waves before the time when nothing would bring her joy this is called the New Orleans farewell you left me an African mask left me to enter the please you cafe on lower st. Charles bacon grease settling on my skin or short and round waitresses older than we leave work swiftly on a washed out Saturday night where tourists wander streets they shouldn't irado, chapatoulas clio, past charity hospital where a half broken banana tree slabs at the heat of July making not a bit of difference to anyone and I can't remember you there no mighty grub beads around your neck no music to sell lying in a hallway gurney, stomach so bloated and tears are often here and the stifling air has no arms and I carry your ashes to the Mississippi River and I remember to be an outlaw to ripple through people's lives with a soft rebellious wave and now sort of comically sort of and this is called almost old and the running joke with this is I wrote it when I was almost old but now I'm old but I'm still going to read it it's almost old I don't want to change the title now almost old the hitch to being almost old is the idea of Florida strip malls and strippers a restaurant or two by Walmart or the villages where Mitt Romney spoke of better days 25 years ago I took a train to New Orleans and stayed for 14 years living a dystopia life a dystopian life held up at gunpoint twice the smell of jasmine stayed with me even after the police came three days later and rice in a coffin in the Halloween for Halloween and vampires in the humid mist I can't go anywhere anymore 50 years ago I moved to Aspen with four friends in a Jeep the heated winter pool lights and skiers my first girl love I left for San Francisco before AIDS touching the hands of long-haired strangers I could have found Charlie Manson in Peace Park among the girls I laughed with now Montpelier Vermont the smell of winter air and moaning mornings I think of Florida I take a nap reliving times with old friends and saying final goodbyes words I might have forgotten thank you thank you Linda our last poet is Sam Stockwell she's published in Ogney, Plowshares and The New Yorker among other publications her two books are entitled Animals and Recital on the National Poetry Series USA and Editors Prize at Elixir respectively recent poems are on the Seawall and Sugar House Review are in on the Seawall and Sugar House Review and are forthcoming in Plume and others welcome Sam thanks can you hear me there that's good I'm going to read a longish poem about the in fact longest poem I ever wrote in my life mostly about my work experiences in human services so it has a lot of human suffering but such is the way it's called Chase what happens in late winter is a car goes off the road an EMT with a shiny forehead arrives first the car slid into a ditch filling with icy snow melt and the driver an older woman is trapped the driver's door held closed by the bank and the car is filling with icy water and the woman is saying help me and touches the blood on her face he doesn't know how to break the window a fire truck arrives with a hammer punch and he says watch out and taps and taps until the window breaks the woman is cold and her leg is caught she's baffled by the blood help me she says help me he's holding her head out of the water and he's saying stay with me stay with me the water is cold his hands ache terribly as the water rises but she's just sleeping now people say stay with me because our stories are lonely the EMT and I go on telling stories until someone promises to stay through the night though we know they can't when I was on the playground with a mute child coaxing a staff person across the brown lawns shouting New York is bombed, the towers are falling I thought drama queen but the radios were blurting through the barns in general store and the upper grades couldn't imagine a building taller than the three-story coca-cola plant the total dead in New York would mean this village and the next two handlets would be empty the story of mismatched socks strewn lunch bags a traveling sleeve of the worst girl vanish scale matters in a tragedy the size of absence and smaller tragedies invisible a war veteran in my class had been driving in a convoy when the guy in the back tapped him on the shoulder and said look out he was turning his head as a shell glided through his shoulder but it took the center of the guy in the back I loved his scarred head and the stories of his childhood and the careful voice in which he gave up and disappeared that's what it means to be lost your story muffled by the transit of bodies shuffled from the battlefields on a husk of stained carpet in a rented room in a warren of rented rooms I was watching a baby stretch I had traced this baby several times the father in jail, the mother on the run but I kept calling and now I could see he looked like his grandfather 20 years ago his grandfather worked for me before he raped a client and went home to his wife reading the newspaper and shot her his two daughters endure the state's care until one of them dies at 17 I can't tell you her story I don't know if anyone was listening but the daughter that runs and keeps on running I want to tell her as though he is reaching out from prison to strangle her don't let him win but a cliche won't release her from the terror blanketing her I keep waiting for her but she's not here today just the young daddy newly on parole is this how you hold him is this yes how you hold him her child born strung out and wandering himself help me I say the EMT and I pacing by the side of the road the EMT is watching a woman speeding around a blind curve and the woman on a side road here somewhere being shot by her drug dealer and so on always just behind me the EMT is kind enough to share my haunting and hold my head but will there be a memorial a black wall reflecting pool the EMT and I bring our tools and push to push through the detritus of lives that never really began then return to our good dinners and walks afterward across the park the enjoyment possible from a shared meal and a walk the way love and hope are sustained by ritual and utterly beyond transmission what I would really say to the mother of this baby waving at his shadow is I don't want my hands frozen in a cradle for the dead I'm not sure where we are but help me look for another exit maybe I would match her footfall for footfall kicking at the substrate public tragedies offer some neutral island when the challenger blew up and blew up on the wide TV of the group home I was working in no resident had an IQ above 20 the lot of us voyagers covered in miles of space and scraps of burning cloth orbiting the planet adornment is the ear of culture an echolocation of place so that we don't forget where we belong I hurry to keep in front of the ambulance or the convoy not knowing what station I'm headed for I imagine the sound of the sirens is always around me up the road for me an apartment burned containing a young acquaintance and her boyfriend I mean the ambulance went past my door and the smell of smoke drifted down I had seen her a few days before admired her second baby and imagine the future contained her but not me the neighbors could hear them calling for help pounding on the walls when will I stop hearing the ambulance go by my door you're probably wondering about the trajectory of the orphans of the burning parents and the grandparents themselves the anarchy of loss and then keening forward over the years not everyone reunites with the living when my mother died she wasn't more lost to me than she'd been before schizophrenic she was unappeasable and I never said stay with me though she has the title is partially from a line by Emily Dickinson started early took my dog and the title of this is it did start early my head bound in eggs it did start early my head bound in eggs sometimes you're alive only to how bad you feel like you were the iron skillet banged on the stovetop partly because of how heavy it is to wake the sound of breakfast your grief cozies next to you like a garden sometimes you feel so thin you're happy to have a roll of fat at your hips tethered to the delight of this planet ceaseless hunger alike in our legs here is a moderately funny poem about my childhood which really wasn't that funny an absence mostly of aunts I ate sugar daddies and sugar babies Turkish taffy and Swedish fish atomic fireballs chocolate stars and squirrel nut zippers lifesavers and chuckles peach blossoms and butterfingers glued in my pocket my baby teeth obsessed I ate food too spam potatoes and I was sick mumps, measles, bronchitis my head baubled in concussions from car accidents my father a little drunk in the section I was allergic to mold and dust made my lungs clap flat in another age I would have been dead by five and cute my hair haloed I wheezed through math my skin flowered with chicken pox I knew no order as my father moved us from town to town I was waking urgently I was suicidal and even though I worked to write this down I find it unsurprising a latecomer to the age of reason this is about an an extensive pet funeral and pet burial of late here joins the grey cat to the goldfish an eternal companionship nudging the remains of five dogs we honor the past best by not trying to relive it no more grey cats or shallow graves wiping our hands with a ruckle skin on the backs of our hands wiping our eyes with a old hand on the backs of our hands we thank those who sacrifices were neither brave nor meaningful by weeping freely over the inevitable when the debris is swept off the stage at our passing our history written by those who have none and the small armory of our infection plundered citizens we will know liberty my parents had a my parents were frequently married to each other but they were also separately divorced and in later years when they're both fairly disabled we would try to bring them together because they said they wanted to be with each other she blind, he deaf and propped in a wheelchair after a few minutes of reunion of eyes dampening they seize a favorite quarrel sharpening an old thorn how well they remember their parts who seem to remember nothing and the fierce joy of their rage and the comfort of their former lives I'll read one more and then I will stop I have taught for an eternity at various places mostly at community college sermon on composition oh and my wife will bring up a funny poem for me to read right after this one a sentence Michelle is an equation it needs two balanced parts tired sentences and fresh sentences both it won't make you old you've learned harder things if it is Emerson you have to blame for the state of modern poetry then surely it is Thomas Aquinas you must blame for your essays all human passion undulates in a form like geese tethered in an arrow you can keep your eye on the horizon whatever has fallen will rise up whatever has risen will have its low moment fame and grief follow the same fortune even in the complex fortunes of a young woman and for my closing poem an utterly ridiculous poem yes it's called a song in my heart see I was supposed to print this and if you're of a certain age which I believe most of us are this poem will have actually some meaning for you God thank you for bringing me the blind faith when I can't find my way home and an angel from Montgomery flying somewhere over the rainbow in memory turned my face to the moonlight and loved me a little when I am knocking on heaven's door a big yellow taxi brought me here after a chelsea morning and by the time I got to Woodstock I knew these country roads would take me home when will I be loved by the blue bayou the weight fell off me in the Gulf of Mexico although we built this city to a bohemian rhapsody out of no region wood that ain't mine no more thank you thank you Sam and thank you to all the poets let's hear it for them that closes it for this evening I invite you to partake of some refreshments in the back and buy some books thank you for coming I'm sorry that was early actually yes please let's have a Q&A all right all right I have a question my classic question poets tell us who are your literary influences do you want to can you shout or do you want to use the microphone or okay just shout out names of poets Ocean Juan oh yes Lucille Clifton yes Eileen Miles Anne Sexton yes Andre Lord Adrienne Ridge Anna DeBeer Smith who's not a poet other questions I'm interested in when you started writing when you started thinking of yourself as a poet the question is when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet oh I could write but definitely that's what I want by the time I had hit adolescence I knew that was the only thing I really wanted to do and it pays so well that's like something rich on my beliefs I started in my adolescence I was in a poetry class at school and I fell in love with poetry and I thought that's what I'm going to do as a graduate you can do it no matter what you do for a living I've always written and monitored write but I remember rewriting the story of Christ coming to be a girl in a UFO who saved the world I can write poems like I was 11 yeah I think that same goes for me that it's always poetry it hasn't always been in words though so it took me a while to find the craft of it I just found myself writing really really short things and it's like oh that's a poem and then you know you learn craft around it but there is so much poetry everywhere it can be visual in movement yeah Camie your bio talks about a variety of creative expression when there is an emotion or a thought how does it land in which bucket and does one influence the others oh great question I like the creative inspiration the creative process I don't really know how one thing or another will fall into different categories except maybe when I know that there is a dialogue or conversation I want to have I really think of plays but I have written poetic plays as well and I also do visual art and I dance and I do choreography so when my maize hurt I sit down and write or I write things and then I go oh I would love to see this dance too so it varies that's good I'm going to have to think on that have you ever written express express express express express thank you I haven't had trouble with that express it's a dumb word I'm not clinticular it's a great word have any of you don't you find I'm sorry there are some real similarity between poetry and theater oh absolutely and you know that because you've written plays with poetry yeah and I think they're really commented in a lot of ways they are the way you communicate and you know remind me what a contrasting poetry is do you think about a poem about a painting thank you I know that it's a dumb word there goes way back the haiku used to be basically that it was not about it's nuanced it's not about the painting it's about captioning the painting it is a conversation with it it's the influence or the it's a super interesting it is, it's very interesting because I think there's a lot of time between the two media it's one of the first things we're taught to do in writing class it's always oh to a greetioner I'm like oh I write about my space and so I think maybe most poets have done it to some extent without even knowing maybe I got an image in their head yeah I mean poetry and also what you were saying about poetry and playwright I mean Shakespeare was what got me interested in poetry he was a playwright and a poet so that you know the stuff is meant to be read aloud and I am mostly more of a performance poet than anything you know when there's a lot of imagery that's the most interesting you know you can really write about that in a place because there's so much image I think that's the core of the connection yeah other questions or comments alright well, second time around let me invite you to partake refreshments and buy some books from the poets and thank you for coming