Am I repeating myself when I say that the days continue to blur together, that I'm the chicken with its head cut off, running and running around the coop, that I'm not sure what year we're in, what month, what week, what day?! Okay, I do know that it's Friday, because I arrived home and threw myself on the couch with a volume of relief that one only displays at the end of the week.
Last week I read at the US Naval Academy with poet Brian Turner, who is a wonderful storyteller and teacher. It was an honor to visit the Academy, to meet with so many of its lovely and kind faculty members, and to read for the whole (gulp!) plebe class. Our poetry reading was held in basketball stadium that usually seats something like 6500 students. They had curtained off 2/3 of the stadium. We stood facing the last third, our voices bouncing back at us from the concrete walls and metal risers.
It took me two or three poems before I figured out what to do the sound of my own flying back in my face. Finally, when I started reading "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot," I stepped back three feet from the mic and simply started projecting. The reverb dissipated, and I could finally hear myself read. In another life, I was an actress (can't bring myself to say "actor"), and it turns out that I still know how to fill even very large rooms with my voice. There was a moment right before I stood up to read when I thought, "if there was ever test of whether or not I have stage fright, this will be it." Then I walked to the podium and discovered I wasn't scared. My poems could still be mine, even in this huge echo of a room.
Brian and I read in alternating 15-minute sections. He has done these kinds of events (I imagine) a million times and is an old pro when it comes to delivering his work. I especially enjoyed some of the personal anecdotes he told the audience. One particularly memorable tale involved a scene he witnessed, soon after his return from Iraq: at a rave, a dominatrix holding a whip and leading a man dressed as a pink energizer bunny by a leash. "There are visual rhymes in our culture," Brian said, "visual rhymes for torture." That was a chilling moment--to link this funny story about a rave in the suburbs to America's involvement in torture was both powerful and brave. First the audience laughed, and then it grew quiet with its own discomfort. "Are you thinking about torture?" Brian asked these 18 and 19-year-olds, "Are your asking yourself about the ways in which you might one day be involved in torture?" Pretty gutsy question.
What else? So many student conferences. Lots of grading. Lots of running from meetings to meetings to meeting. And now the campus panic begins as we face the downslope the semester. I always like warning students: the end of the semester will be here VERY soon. They don't believe me, just as I didn't used to believe professors when I was an undergraduate. We were all 18 once. We were all once gifted practitioners of procrastination. Tomorrow. I'll write the first draft tomorrow.
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