Thank you very much, John, for your post about the first Alaric Sumner
festival, and great recognition is due to Lawrence too.

I'm not so great at posting being sort of consumed by my 3-lane life
of teaching, writing, and children, and being a very slow soul. But
now and again I go to readings, and did tonight, so am borrowing from
others in thinking it might be a good idea to let you guys know about
it. Sort of armchair poetry (as opposed to surfin' poetry, abseiling
poetry, spelunking poetry, etc (not another list)).

Anyway, tonight Mike Magee and Mike Gizzi kicked off the first reading
of their second season of Downcity readings with Anselm Berrigan and
there was a pretty good poetry turnout at Tazza on Westminster Street
in downtown Providence which is beginning to lay down its boarded-up
shop fronts and bloom a little. Since the last season of readings in
this pretty elegant joint, a big bookstore has opened next door, and a
contemporary fashion place next door to that, so things are looking up
in what was a cavernous and kinda scary street (used to remind me of
George's Street in Dublin minus the human life).

Anselm Berrigan is the son of a son of Providence, Ted Berrigan. He's
also the son of Alice Notley, and the brother of Ed Berrigan, so
there's a seriously scary amount of poets in that family. In one poem
Anselm read tonight he remarked that at 31, I think, he was earning
more money than his parents did at that age. Doesn't bear thinking
about. All I can say is, *my* daughter will be studying business. In
conscious resistance to the poems he has written in response to the
times we are living in, Anselm read poems mindful of friends, living
and dead.
The poem I liked best was about a day in 1985 or 1986, when he was 13,
trailing home from school in NYC, up to no good with friends who were
even moreso up to no good, I liked that ambulatory, 13-year old
razor's edge poem, and the punishment he eventually got from his
mother for wandering all over the boroughs kicking in doors: to read
For Whom the Bell Tolls. I also liked a few lines about hanging chads
and pregnant chads and their shiver-down-the-spine consequences.
Also a sequence he read about how he felt during the day: he felt
quite good for a few minutes but then not so good for 20, then a bit
better for 2 minutes, and then not so good for quite a while, then
blank after work, then good for five minutes ... I liked that. I
could have stood the whole 24 hours of that. But where do you really
stop?

The reading had a festival feel. I could see what looked like
Christmas lights dangling outside. There was the most amazing
half-moon. I mean: really sliced down the middle visibly. I could
see the radiant shadow of the other half.
Lots of Providence poets were there, Mike Gizzi and Mike Magee who
organized it, Robert Creeley, William Gillespie and Brian Kim Stefans,
Jim Behrle came down from Boston (quite a few Boston poets there),
Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright, John Landry. I don't know everyone so
there were many more.

And there is a British and Irish connection, or at least an Irish one. Because
if George Bush wins the election, some of these folks are emigrating
to Ireland. So they say. And it's not me.

Well, that's a blast of Providence for you tonight.

Mairead