POETICKS

During the fall of 1991 I finished getting the revised edition of Of Manywhere-at-Once

I participated in my first local poetry reading on  Saturday  26 October 1991.  It took place at the Sea Grape art gallery in Punta Gorda.  My writers’ group friend, Ken Reynaud,  picked me up about 1:30 and got me there ten minutes before the reading began.  (A bicycle, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, by then was my only mode of transportation, other than my legs by themselves.)  The reading went quite well.  I would guess that about thirty people attended parts of it and 15 to 20 were still there when I did my presentation, around 4.  There were two featured readers.  The first was a 78-year-old lady who had just begun writing poems a year ago, but had written over three hundred.  She was amusing, and some of her poems were quite funny.  They were pure doggerel, though, and the seriousest ones were horrible-bad sentimental and uninspired.

At about 2:45 the main poet came on, a guy in his thirties, I would guess, Michael Haymans, who has since become a good friend of mine.  He was an excellent speaker, helped a good deal by having memorized most of his poems.  Free verse celebrations of Florida wildlife constituted perhaps half his poems, and they were pretty good, although not technically adventurous.  He threw in a few preachy b.s. poems and a couple of comic poems.  I talked to him later and learned that he’s part of a local band, which explains his effective manner as a reader.  (As does his being a lawyer, something else I soon learned about him.)  He’s part of the monthly “literary salon” that’s started up recently in the county, and that I heard about from Linda Salisbury, another local writer who does a humorous column for one of the papers whom I met (I believe) at one of my writers’ group meetings.  I hope to get involved in it somehow.  It meets evenings, though, so it might be difficult.  We had a break for cookies and apple cider after Mike’s stint, which lasted about an hour.  Five people presented material after the break.  The first was Claire Smith, whom I’d met at the Tuesday Writers’ Club once or twice.  She did some competent  light verse.  She was followed by the local Save-the-Trees radical, Louise Ratterman (I think that’s her name), who read just one poem–about a flower.  She read well enough vocally, but hunched up as she read, and didn’t glance up from her poem till the end.  She also wore a pink dress and thick glasses that made her look like a fifth-grader from the 50′s, reciting for a class assignment.

At that point I came on.  I was nervous but got through my first poem (“On the Outskirts of Westport”) without a mishap, and it seemed to go over reasonably well.   I left out a part of my first real line but said the important part of it and got through my second poem, the definition of visual poetry as ampersand cubed pretty well.  I got a laugh when I admitted that some friends had found the definition “not that helpful.”  My “nocturne,” which came next, got the best reception.  It elicited several oooo’s and ahhhs, in fact.  I think I might have over-explained it, but no one seemed to mind.  “The Serpent” got a few chuckles, and my final piece, the haiku about “the raw hues of lights,” did okay, I guess.  I got good applause, and then one of the ladies in charge of the gallery wanted to know what I was doing with my work, whether I was getting it out where people could enjoy it (she seemed to like it quite a bit), so I summarized the American visual poetry scene, as I know it.  Later she made a point of getting my phone number and address in case they had another reading.  I chatted a bit with Claire Smith, then left.  A good experience.

REPRODUCTIONS of the pieces I read or showed here.

The very next day I again was active marketing myself, this time at a fair that began with four guys parachuting into the county auditorium parking lot while the Charlotte High School Band performed.  Once all the parachutists were down, the band marched into the auditorium.  The tables and booths and what not within the auditorium were attractively arranged.   Quite a lot of visimagery on display but none of it even slightly interesting to one of my refined taste, none of it post-impressionism, and hardly any of it even impressionistic.  I met Linda Grotke Salisbury and her husband, with whom I was to share a table.  Nice people.  I left all four of my books plus copies of my seaquence (REPRODUCE) plus a number of my Score Sheets and Score Reviews–and my ampersand piece with them.  I returned at around five.  Linda said she’d sold quite a few of her own books but none of mine.  The author’s presence helped, she said.  I bought a copy of her first book and read a few pieces from it when I got home.  She has a nice breezy, amusing style.  The usual kind of Bombeck et al subjects but well-done and well-packaged.

Around the middle of November, the first excerpt of my book appeared on the front page (and second) of the newsletter John Byrum edited, and my piece on John Bennett’s “The Shirt, the Sheet” was on page three.  Bennett had a review in the issue, too, and Geof’s article on the art strike was reprinted as well.  The highpoint of the issue for me, though, was a reference to me as “a nationally-known poet and critic.”  When I read that to Mother, her response, after a laugh, was, “Not internationally?”  Later, Lee made the same remark when I read the line to the Tuesday Writers’ Club.

Meanwhile, I got a letter from some Who’s Who people saying I had passed some preliminary screening process.  A text about me was included.  I was to correct it and return it.  This I did.  The letter was mainly about an opportunity I was being given to buy a copy of the book for only $120 or something in that range.  I wouldn’t pay $5 for it, even if that guaranteed that I would have an entry in it.  I was annoyed by all this, for the first letter said nothing about a series of screenings, and there was no point in getting corrections to my text until it was certainit would be used.  It’s clearly a scam to get me sufficiently hepped up about being close to getting into the book to order a copy.

Throughout the month I stayed busy printing out (and continuing to revise) the pages of the second volume of Of Manywhere-at-Once.  I noticed quite a few passages that could have been improved but I just didn’t have the time or desire to go through the damned thing yet another time.  At around the middle of the month I had my pages all printed, but had to paste in the illustrations I wanted to use.  Having 100 copies of the book printed would cost around $500, I’d found out.  Plus shipping, which turned out to be a couple of hundred dollars, to my surprise and dismay.

All kinds of little chores had yet to be taken care of, like outlining my pages in blue to make sure the printer got the margins right.  Hence, the month was just about over when I finally was able to package my book and drop it off at the UPS depot.

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