AFTER THE READING

I’m going to read at Bluestockings in about forty minutes and I haven’t figured out what to wear yet but I do know what I’m reading. I’m expecting there’ll be a nice audience and I have friends coming, and my girlfriend, and I’m looking forward to it which I usually do cause I love reading. It seems like the most athletic part of our sport. The breath moment. I’m not nervous yet but I hopefully I will be. Because if I don’t feel slightly like I’m going to be executed before a reading then I don’t have anything to work with or live through while I’m up there. My actor friend Tom once told me about something called flop sweats and what it means I think is when you go on feeling flat before a performance and the fear hits you dead on in front of people. Ideally you want it before so you can begin to manage your feeling beforehand and do what you do do to calm down.

 

After the reading is the part that’s truly hard. If you have a new book the afterward is forestalled. People buy the book hopefully and you get busy signing. There’s problems in there too.  Sometimes I forget the names of people I know really well. It’s like the sheet in my brain where their name is written is torn right out of my head. You can’t say who are you to someone you know very well. You can ask them about the spelling but then it’ll be Barbara and she’ll know you are full of shit.  It’s best to either ask it straight out or else write nothing and in a moment their name will snap into your brain like fruit and then you will have to make up another excuse to grab the book back and write their name in. Meanwhile I’m stalling for time. When the signing is over, once the reading is done, that’s the worst. Sometimes because everyone thinks you are going out with someone else finally you are standing there with no one except the people who work in the store.  Matthew Stadler who lives in Portland where I just read had this experience sort of. Him being alone afterwards seemed to be the plan. The people at Missoula swept him after the reading right back to his hotel before he could say duh and he wound up abjectly wandering into the hotel bar and sat down on a stool where a woman getting a drink was in the exact same situation as him and she turned out to be Agnes Varda who he had a wonderful conversation with. This has never happened to me. The aftermath is generally harrowing. Even if there is a dinner planned I’m not sure where I should sit at the table and something generally gets me there slowly or late and I get stuck in a corner and a marvelous night now feels totally glum.  There’s a thing about giving a reading which in fact is that one gets pumped and in the theater world there’s green rooms and one gets shepherded but I’m not talking (I think) so much about fame or power in the theater world vs. the paucity of it in ours though more precisely I mean something about the enormous power of giving a reading and how do you get down from that cliff on your own. In our world I don’t think there’s much acknowledgement of the reading high except that we know younger (and older, people who drink) poets get trashed and that’s a good solution. Retreat into nature, the anonymous, the Dionysian.  Just get lost. It’s an issue of transition, the reading aftermath, which might be the most interesting thing to me today. How to get from here to there. And it’s like if you’ve been strong seeming up there – at the podium – the assumption is you know how to make a plan for yourself for afterwards, or you can obviously secure a good seat at the table.  But that’s utterly wrong because the de-acceleration is occurring rapidly.  The person who read is gone and you are standing in their clothes on the verge of collapse and nobody knows. Poets navigate the highs and the lows. Within the poem. But we also do it between the reading and the world.  If you see a poet after a reading ask them if they know what they are doing afterwards. If you are going to the restaurant with them guide them into a fine seat near people they love. There should be an etiquette book for us and our hosts and our friends. Right after a reading or a performance never look the poet in her face without mentioning what she’s just done and say obliviously how are you. Or what’s new. She’s still standing up there on the cliff in the midst of incredible wind. Tell her that you can see that she’s there (i.e. she’s real) and then that you saw her. Help her up, help her down, help her out.

 

Postscript:  Last night it went well, weirdly, maybe because I had consciously been thinking about it.  A couple of good friends, Trini and Matt said you want to have dinner. I said uh yeah. But scared. Then Cecilia slid up. Anything going on after. Yes I said gesticulating towards Trini and Matt who weren’t standing by. Leopoldine, my girlfriend was near. Will you go out with a group of people. Yeah she grinned. I love her grin. I think it’s like Paulette Goddard’s in Modern Times but I have to see it again to see if that’s true.  The group wandered aimlessly through the lower east side, everyone indulging my need to be in charge looking for a restaurant but I had no idea. I had one but I couldn’t find it. Trini was ultimately in charge and twice she lead the charge and got us into a good one and damn it just worked out. Nobody knew each other but they are all odd and amazing people, the table was round and red and it became a second event not about me at all except that after an event one is a little sticky and if you let the stickiness work increasingly loosening you’ll be okay. But the people around you need to be kind and they were.