Stop! Look! Listen!

For more than a year now, I have not read a book of my choosing for myself.  

Reading remains, in its many facets and prisms of accessibility, a privilege – and the freedom to read what one wishes continues to be a luxury.  

Is a poet’s life the support for poetry, or is poetry a support for the poet’s life? As much as Santoka Tenada, a mendicant Zen priest and haiku poet of the twentieth century, tried to live a good life according to the Tao, his inveterate love of sake and general need to carouse left him with poetry as the only means of perfecting what he was unable to perfect in life: mainly, the thing in us that wants to be better, the thing which, for a host of competing reasons, we are usually unable to achieve in life. 

I learned of Lucky Lo’s album, Supercarry, by happy coincidence. 

Needing a weeknight drink, I went to a friend’s café in Odense, Denmark, only to find the café already stuffed with guests–young and old, plain and flamboyant–hunched around the tables, a buzz of anticipation in the air. 

While I’m happy to write, I’m just as pleased to read. This is what Poetry Weekend means to me. My poems, my friends’ poems, the moving words of professionals and colleagues and artists are all the better heard echoing from the walls of Memorial Hall. I’ve only attended in-person twice; I started reading my own work during the Zoom years. I’ve been writing my whole life but poetry only for three years, and I know I have so much to learn and catch up on. This makes two days of poets and their work so valuable and so fulfilling.