Poetry Project

I'll be reading with Will Alexander at the Poetry Project in New York City this coming Wednesday, December 10, at 8PM. I first met and heard Will read over twenty years ago, at the Writing from the New Coast conference at University of Buffalo in 1993. It will be very nice to see him again.Reading at the Project feels kind of like going home for the holidays: the return to a familiar place. Familiar, or family-like, comes from the Latin famulus, meaning, not all together surprisingly, "servant," or even "slave." (Does anyone remember that Tama Janowitz book Slaves of New York? It was very 80s). Whenever I go to the Project, I expect to run into friends and acquaintances who have been dutifully serving poetry for many years, and who also feel that the Project is a kind of home. I read there for the first time with Mark McMorris in 1997, the year after my first book came out. In 2003, Anselm Berrigan invited me to read with Robert Creeley. I recall a humid torrent of November rain splashing me on the way in, and a woman's cell phone—playing Mozart's Overture to Le Nozze di Figaro—going off while I read a poem about death. In 2010 I read with Miles Champion, who brought his newborn. I'm looking forward to Wednesday's reading, to returning once again to this familiar home for lost and wayward poems.