Visit to New York

Click to play New York 08

Above are some pics of the trip to New York I just returned from to read in the 2nd Annual Boog City Festival. I’m grateful to David Kirschenbaum for organizing this gargantuan event and inviting me to take part.

There’s not a whole lot to say about it. The trip was necessarily brief because Sean, Robbie and I — who drove down together in Sean’s trusty Ford, and I’m sorry I didn’t get any pics of us — all had to zip back to catch up on reading and whatnot for school. Probably the most fun I had was swapping bullshit on the way down with those two, hanging out with Kyle Schlesinger and his son Alistair Sat. morning in Brooklyn, and walking around Manhattan on this gorgeous day.

Then too I met some interesting new poets in the controlled chaos of the marathon reading and strolled with them to a bar on St. Marks where we downed Brooklyn lager and told each other the most embarrassing poet we’ll admit to liking. (Among the answers: Anne Sexton, Robinson Jeffers, Charles Simic, Bukowski.) While I speed-walked back to the venue with a nice buzz on, this unfortunately made me miss Kyle and Robbie as the reading by this point was running 30-45 minutes ahead of schedule. Essentially I missed my own reading, as I was scheduled to go right after them.

Buy me a beer sometime and you can ask me about it.

RIP Reginald Shepherd, 1963-2008

Just got this sad news from the poetics group list at UB. I’d been following Reginald’s blog and its excruciatingly honest accounts of his illness for some time, ever since coming across an interesting article about him in Poets and Writers. Apparently, he applied for the job here at UB. Didn’t get it, but it would have been interesting to meet and possibly work with him if he had.

Here’s a tribute at the Poetry Foundation.

i’m always the same

Here’s a song I just received from my friend Oleg in Russia (that’s him in the middle, playing guitar).

It captures my current state of mind pretty well. More soon.