This is my first ever view of Lake Superior, which I have wanted to see ever since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by way of Gordon Lightfoot called the Great Lake they Call Gitche Gumee to my attention:
It’s sort of impossible to capture the mind-blowing vastness, but going out into it on a boat can help:
Even then, it can take a lot of thinking and staring past a dude in a Rush concert T-shirt to try to understand that you are looking at three quadrillion gallons of water:
As the carved graffito on this Civilian Conservation Corps bridge duly notes, it was more than a dream within a dream:
Thanks, Henry; thanks Gordon; thanks anonymous graffito-carver.
The finest house that drug money ever built…
…is what reader Quraysh Ali Lansana called the new Poetry Foundation building at Collection & Cocktails earlier this evening…
…and the new building is so transparent…
…and book-filled (the library has over 30,000 volumes! You can go read any and/or all of them for free!)…
…that it would be hard to disagree. The shindig began when the sun was so bright that its rays were practically knocking attendees off the walkway, like so…
…and the building was so reflective, it practically begged you to take a self-portrait below the words “Ruth Lilly Friend and Benefactor of Poetry:”
Inside, Dolly Lemke, Philip Jenks, Quraysh, Anthony Madrid, Mike Puican, Robbie Q. Telfer, and Jennifer Karmin read excellent pieces they’d found in the collection by Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Edward Spenser, Mark Doty, Jack Gilbert and Frank O’Hara respectively. I read one by Hortense Flexner, whom I am betting a lot of money you have never heard of. I chose her based on three criteria, including: 1) someone I knew nothing about, not even her name, 2) a woman (because I like to represent the ladies), 3) the book must date from pre-1975 for added strangeness owing to temporal distance. The poem I read was “Minor Poet,” which goes as follows:
It is not that you had only one
Very good thought,
Great men survive, as a rule,
By not more than five — sometimes seven.
But they have a way of riding at beauty
With a lifted spear,
And at truth with a sword.
In a cloud of flame and battle they ride —
And their hands are torn.
And you — you said a great many things,
With one good one.
But there are no high, invisible banners
Waving about your words;
There is no mist in your throat,
And the stars do not choke you!
Thanks to the Poetry Foundation for opening their collection of books to the public, to Katherine Litwin, the librarian, and Holly, the library assistant, for hosting tonight’s event, and thanks to the audience…
…the audience…
…for listening.