Bright College Fears

I'm posting this from a dorm room in Timothy Dwight College at Yale, where I am beng housed before giving a poetry reading tomorrow as part of the 30th reunion of the class of 1979. It's a brick building, not one of the gray Gothic ones I liked to frequent as an undergrad, which helps me feel more removed from the carousing outside my window, still going strong just after midnight.

I've been enjoying planning this reading. I want to share poems that touch on the kinds of common experiences my classmates have probably all had in the last three decades, mostly death, birth, and love. As I say this to a small group of folks imbibing cucumber flavored vodka (delicious! organic! and much better than the beer at this particular shindig), someone asks me, nervously, how hard my poems are to understand. I"m sympathetic. Probably half of the contemporary poems I read or hear leave me feeling stupid--and I think about poetry all the time. I feel genuine sympathy for the layman in this situation.

I hasten to reassure him, saying that I think they are pretty accessible, but my goal is to make them beautiful too, so that even if you don't understand them consciously, you don't feel cheated but can allow them to work on a chemical level.

Like many theories I make up as I'm saying them, it strikes me first as a bit disingenuous, but on examination as actually rather true. But I'm nervous! Here's my general audience coming...

(beat) Now it's the next night, 11 pm, the reading safely over, and the deiivery of the reunion poem i wrote especially for the class dinner over too. And guess what! There IS an audience for poetry, if we want it! The last kudo I heard, before stumbling, half-pickled on cucumber vodka after dancing my heart out to 70s music for a couple more hours, was "thank you! you captured it all."

What more could a poet want?

Viva l'occasional poem!