The Poetry Reading

This past Saturday the winners of 54th Annual Poetry Contest sponsored by the CNY branch of the National League of American Pen Women and the Syracuse Post Standard were honored at a reading at the library in Liverpool. The contest is open to poets from kindergarten age to adults. I've entered the contest in the adult category almost every year since about 1990 and have won honorable mentions, third place twice and second place once. This year I was honored to receive first place.

At award ceremonies other years I have cringed when some of the youngsters have read their poems, wishing someone had spent some time preparing them for the public speaking part of being a poet. Often very wonderful poetry got lost in the terror of having to stand in front of a room full of people reciting the words. It was totally different this year. Some of the young poets had even memorized their work....certainly a humbling experience for me.

I absolutely loved the poem I submitted this year, although when I sent it off, I was certain my chances at even an honorable mention would be slim. One never knows what others are looking for in these contests, and typically the poems I write that I really like fall short. When I got the phone call I had won, and that this particular poem had been selected, I was floored, to say the least. It's the only really good thing that's happened in awhile. I needed that success.

My fear of flubbing my reading due to the level of Vicodin in my veins was great. I was one of the very last to read, and the poems read before me, by all ages, were absolutely fantastic. I sat there thinking, "It's so hard to imagine that my poem compares to these others; they are so fine." I knew I had to be "on".

And then I began to read, and I fell in love with my poem all over again. It's a long poem about a really bad day my friend had when a neighbor's dog got into her chicken coop. I gave it the title "The Last Straw" as it chronicles all that goes wrong that day. Folks laughed in the right places, though. They "got" it. I loved reading it. Their applause seemed genuine, more than the polite "oh you won a contest" clapping I've heard before. I walked away, for the first time, feeling as if I'm really a writer.

That's what I'm going to tell the surgeon Wednesday: I'm a writer! Hurry up and fix this shoulder. I need to write. I need to get out there and read my poems to more people. That's what I do. I'm a writer. Fix me up so I can get back to doing what I need to do. Fast.

The Poetry Readng

Here's a photo of me reading....I'm in purple on the left. And the next photo shows what it looked like in front of me...

Mary Ellen and I were honored to have 38 people attend our reading. It's a small bookstore, as you may be able to tell from the photo. Several folks are sitting on the floor. We filled the place!

Our audience laughed in the right places, listened intently, and even bought our book!

The reception afterwards at my apartment was a blast! And then my brother, sister-in-law and a childhood friend treated Chris and me to dinner. (Since it would have been my dad's 77th birthday that day, we chose to go to his favorite kind of restaurant....Stella's Diner. We were too full from the reception to really eat, but we had such fun chatting.)

Whew...it's over.....and the magic of the day still lingers. I am content today. I feel like a real poet.

Angst: Part 1

Mary Ellen will be back in town briefly tomorrow and we'll be meeting to go over the menu for the reception following our reading on October 18th. Because we both live in woods opposite directions from Syracuse for the summer, we haven't seen much of each other. We've managed a couple of quick face-to-face meetings -- opening the box of our books that arrived, going to the bookstore to settle on a date for the reading, etc. -- but no time to just sit and think it all out together. We've been e-mailing....but she can't hear the panic in my typed words.

I'm not agonizing over the reading itself.....I'm looking forward to that part. I actually LIKE these poems. We lived with them for so long while we were putting the book together, I had feared we'd end up hating them, but that hasn't happened. It was fairly easy for me to select the ones I wanted to read (even after my brother said he was coming and asked if I'd be reading anything that might embarrass him). Of course, I transferred the poems selected onto individual pages in the largest font I could manage....one of those necessary tasks when your age reaches a speed limit.

It's the party at my place that's keeping me up at night. As you know, we moved across the street in July. Some of the folks who say they'll be at the reading haven't seen the place yet...it was one of those "kill two birds with one stone" decisions of mine to have the party here and not in the Green Street Community Garden. Well that and the fact that I have a bathroom.

Will Rupert the Wonder Dog -- still adjusting to being back among city noises -- behave? Will my mother-in-law teeter about wiping away cobwebs I haven't noticed and complaining that I didn't put out enough food or too much food? Do I have enough chairs? Do I need to make coffee? (never made a pot of coffee in my life...) Do I have enough wine glasses? Will people leave after a short period of time so I may have the meltdown I know is coming in privacy?

And of course, the huge fear: what if nobody comes?