Thanks to Claire Guyton and Josh Gauthier for inviting me to read with the amazing Jefferson Navicky. We’re talking about the prose poem, and I’m reading “Cachexia,” which was a finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. In this restricted life we are living in pandemic Covid times, our world has turned to Zoom. Not my favorite venue by a long shot, and I am concerned that it is here to stay. Our disconnection in this country is a problem with which we already struggle, and we will not benefit from a generation growing up not knowing all the aspects of being human that personal presence carries.
All these distant platforms, however, do mean that you can either attend a reading or hear one that was recorded that you wouldn’t have been able to. Over the years, I have read in a number of venues and with some amazing writers, but if you weren’t able to be there, you just never heard it. My first real experience of people showing up for me virtually was when I read for the Castine library in early summer and read from A Dangerous New World, an anthology in which I have work. There were people from Texas, Georgia, Bermuda, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and all over Maine. Some I knew and many I didn’t. In this particular venue, you couldn’t attend in real time, so here I am finally putting it into my world. Thanks for showing up for me and my makings in any form.