I ate at Ray's this past Saturday. Twice in fact. Once before and once after the reading. I can't remember exactly which time it was when the three East Asian women were standing in front of the counter for what seemed to be an endless amount of time before ordering. And then one of them wanted a slice of this, which the counter guy took to be two slices of that then they had to cry out, although not too shrilly, "No! No!" It was hard to have patience with them even as one of them had to point to a sign on the wall with several pictures of pizzas on it in order to indicate what it was that she was interested in eating. I had to have patience because I've been to Japan and have had to order food by dragging waiters out into the street so I could point at something in the window and until we were both nodding our heads. "Yes? Yes?" "Yes." I'm a whiz at the whole food pointing conversation, but not everyone is. I even pick up useful phrases with some ease. By the time I'd left Japan after two and a half weeks I could say "More water please," and "No thank you." Furthermore I had to have patience because I'd only been to Spain a week before and marched all over the southern part of that country butchering the language. I'd managed to convince myself that "ello" was an alternate form of "el," the word for "he." Not so hard to understand, being that "ella" is "she" and "ellos" is the masculine form of "them." People seemed to be happy to nod encouragingly nonetheless. My friend Thomas asked the man next to us in the stands at a bullfight how many bulls he was going to kill that day. Six, the man answered. Apparently he was set to leap down from the stands with a flourish at any moment.

Ray's is a good spot. I'm talking, for what it's worth of the one on Prince St. in Manhattan, just West of Bowery. I've eaten there before and written about the pizza in greater detail on these pages, but I don't remember exactly when. The flavors were all working well separately and together. The slice I had before the reading was actually the lesser of the two and I'm pretty sure that I remember now that the East Asian women were there for the slice after the reading. It was the one before when the woman with the stroller was talking with the counter guy in Spanish and I was up at the counter right behind a guy delivering a cheesecake. The bill said nineteen dollars for the cheesecake and they gave the guy a twenty. There's a restaurant attached to Rays where you can go in and sit down at a table and be waited on. But in case you were wondering, they don't make their own cheesecake.

The reading. Frankly I don't feel like writing about the reading all that much because it's just plain easier for me to talk about pizza. But the reading was at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Segue reading series Saturdays at four. Mind you that's four o'clock poetry time. So really I mean closer to four twenty. Maybe four thirty. What is wrong with people that they can't get it together enough to show up on time and get things started on time? Who started this whole tradition of starting things later than they're scheduled to start. I'll tell you this much, they weren't running that bullfight that way. It was scheduled for Six Thirty and the bands started playing at six thirty sharp and the picadors and company came out into the ring. Of course, I don't really know why I'm complaining. I think I rolled in there at about four fifteen.

The introductions for the readers weren't short at all. Neither of them were. Marcella Durand had asked me about five minutes before things began if I'd write some kind of damn report on the reading for The Poetry Project Newsletter. I took this way too seriously it seems, because I started taking all kinds of notes and writing down all manner of questions touching upon issues raised for me by what I perceived as the poetics of the two readers. I feel as though I should apologize in advance for not really totally "getting" the whys and wherefores of the two readers, as it seems that there are certainly people out there who do get them. At the same time I absolutely don't feel like apologizing, and recognize that my writing this is just some way of covering my ass for those people who might think me foolish for not understanding the work. Bleah. Whatever. The fact of the matter is that as I write this I'm simply unhappy because there's water coming down through my bathroom ceiling after it was just put back up and re-painted after four months. Okay, let's not get too far into that and instead I'll continue without apology.

Marcella asked me to write a report and as I've already mentioned I was somewhat hesitant. Okay I didn't mention that I was hesitant, but I'm thinking that my calling it a "damn report" might give one reason to assume that I had some kind of reservations. I had come to the reading because a couple of people had earlier mentioned the reading, especially mentioning Steve McCaffrey's name and while I didn't recognize either of the two names at the time (I remembered that I'd seen Steve McCaffrey read before once someone mentioned the Four Horsemen) I thought that that might be reason enough to attend the reading.

The introductions were long. Part of me wants to write "way too long" but frankly their length didn't bother all that much. Nada introduced Lynne Dreyer (?) first and began by reading a long quote from someone or other's poetics statement, and then asked us if we could guess who the author was. The audience was silent. Charles Bernstein finally piped up and said "I know, but I don't think it's fair that I should answer." The passage was from Lynne Dreyer's poetics statement in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, a book which Nada claims to have carried around with her for years like The Bible. (But no one will publish my variations on the Lord's Prayer. I'll bet there aren't any of those in that Bible! Goddamn idolaters. ("What's he going on about now?" "I'm not sure, let's be quiet and see if he starts to make sense again."))

Unfortunately I don't have that many notes on Nada's introduction. She mentioned Lynne's new book Catch as Catch Can, and either said that she was from Phoenix, or that as a writer she is like a Phoenix. I'm guessing that it was the latter since I gathered that Lynne is only now publishing her second book after several years and that she's given so few readings lately (in New York or otherwise) that this is the first time that many people there had seen her read.

Skip the petty bullshit

Even if I was the most qualified person in New York to be writing a report on this reading I still don't know how good a job I'd do of it considering that I was distracted almost from the beginning by the presence of a poet that I know and his wife. The poet and I used to get on quite well as did his wife and I until after some bad dealings regarding some work I did for her on her website. It seems that I ripped her off, and now neither of them will speak with me, and move away from me whenever I pass, much in the same way that people on a subway car will almost climb on top of one another to avoid being touched by a particularly pungent homeless man walking from one end of the car to the other. Purely by chance I ended up sitting in the very first row of chairs, which is separated from the stage by several small tables with chairs around them. Sitting directly in front of me was the aforementioned poet's wife.

Frankly her presence sets me off balance perhaps as much I do her, although it's not so much because I dislike her as it is that I find it terribly awkward being in the same room with someone who I know clearly dislikes me. Sorry folks, however silly, that's the way that I am. So it's entirely possible that all that I mention going on hereafter is merely a projection, my own interpretation of the events that transpired. She and I don't speak to one another, so there's really no way for me to ever verify whether her experience was at all similar. Nonetheless, I may write here as one who is at least moderately omniscient. Hopefully I won't get too carried away.

I was sitting directly behind her, because although she was sitting at a table her chair was facing the stage directly. I was sitting almost right behind her but had plenty of leg room (I'm 6' 3") and so had to cross my legs so I could prop up—oh for the love of Christ here's the deal: I had my legs crossed and so my left foot was about a foot away from the back of her coats, which she'd slung around the back of her chair. Early in the reading when she went to hang her coats on the back of her chair her hand bumped into my foot although she didn't say anything. Since now she was aware of my foot being there she became nervous (this is the omniscient part) about my maliciously kicking her in the back or wiping my foot on her coat. Throughout the reading she kept fidgeting with her coats, or scooching her chair forward or turning around and fidgeting with her coats and noting the position of my foot.

Yes it's petty. And it's silly. But in spite of all of this I found that I had a hard time breaking away from all that and not thinking about any of it. So it made it difficult for me to focus on work that I already have some difficulty grasping.

I do wish that I had a recording of the reading so I could listen to it again. My notes only return me to my original frustration, begun upon the conclusion of Lynne Dreyer's reading. As the band manager in A Mighty Wind: "Wha hahpen?" Following Nada's introduction, Lynne said a few things about her work, among them that what she does is put feeling into the present tense. Whether this came across for me or no is another matter entirely.

Of the title of her new book, Catch as Catch Can, Lynne Dreyer relayed that this is a term from collegiate wrestling, that it's one of several kinds of wrestling. In Catch as Catch Can wrestling, many of the normal constraints are off, and all that you have to do is pin your opponent on his back for a 3-count. She read sections of the title poem, ending with a section called "Keeper." The whole poem was going to have this name originally, but she later decided against it.

More sports reference. "Keeper" is what the goal keeper screams out during a soccer game when she wants the ball.

Here are my notes, for better or for worse:

POEMS CONTAINTING NUMEROUS FRAGMENTS WOVEN TOGETHER CONCEALING OR ELIMINATING THE SEAMS BUT A VARIETY OF P.O.V.S & NARRATIVE MODES—PERSONAL, EVENTS DESCRIBED AS BEING TOLD TO SOMEONE AS THOUGH THEIR RELEVANCE OT THE LISTENER WAS ALREADY APPARENT & MOMENTS WHERE INFORMATION DATA IS PUT FORWARD W/O AN INTENDED LISTENER/AUDIENCE—STAGE DIRECTIONS ALTHOUGH LACKING A CONNECTION TO AN AVAILABLE PLAYTHESE OTHER VOICES SUBSTITUTED FOR THE PLAY.

There's a problem for me here in that at the end of this reading, and the case is also true for Mr. McCaffrey, that even with my notes I might be able to describe how things worked formally, but not what the poems were about, what content or intention was behind them. For some reason I've always had it in the back of my mind that maybe this is the part of the point(?) of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, although I'm not terribly clear on what the appeal would be of such an aesthetic. At the same time I know that I've written and read many poems which did not have an obvious or wholly connected narrative and enjoyed them nonetheless. What makes the difference? Is this a "whole greater than the sum of its parts" situation? Further, what is the relevance of the titles in these works? What is held down for 3 seconds? What ball is the author is calling for? My guess is that looking for so literal a manifestation of the titles in these poems will get me nowhere, but I'm left with little else to do.

At the break I got a second ginger ale & cranberry juice. Seeing that I was holding money to pay him with the bartender told me "It's happy hour pal" and walked away. I'd figured as much, but I wasn't sure if that applied only to beer or only to well drinks or what.

Gary Sullivan's introduction of Steve McCaffrey was also fairly lengthy and I'm not really sure what entirely it had to do with the reader. It drew on notes he'd accidentally opened up the other night when preparing his notes for the introduction. The accidental notes were on a particular Bollywood director, and after reading a few paragraphs into these notes, Gary decided to re-write the story of the movie with Steve McCaffrey in the lead role, and so he took off on a wild, rambling story I believe was intended to reflect the humor and wildness contained in Mr. McCaffrey's own writing.

In fact, McCaffrey's writing was in fact quite humorous, chock full o' references, cultural, literary, political. After the reading another writer described him as a "fireworks performer," not by way of saying that his poems are all flash, but that they are filled with small explosions. McCaffrey's reading style borders on performance, perhaps further aided by his accent.

But again, what at the end of these poems is there? Something apparently, because the audience applauded wildly following his performance. The last poem McCaffrey read began with the line "It's a funny feeling to be surrounded with what you hold" and ended with "All the myriad places you have left your words." Again, these poems had enormous impact in the moment for me. I was much entertained even if Mr. McCaffrey did seem to be switching channels every five lines or so, but now what do I have that remains? (There were however, those who did take away more content-wise than I did. After the reading I overheard a poet describing how he and another could barely contain themselves while listening to a poem written after Coleridge's "Ars Poetica" (am I getting that story right?) noting all the references Steve was making to poems or lines of Coleridge's. Perhaps in my efforts to understand the poems or to figure out what I could report about them I failed to see the forest for the trees. (Or perhaps I need to brush up on my Coleridge.)

And perhaps this shouldn't be a criticism of these two writers. Dreyer wants to put "feelings into present tense," so possibly a result of that is that after one hearing I come away with more of an impression than a complete understanding. To enjoy fireworks do I have to be part of the Grucii family?

I'm running out of steam here. After the reading I walked down Bowery with some other poets and turned off on Prince St. heading both for the train and Ray's again. I got a slice and god bless the counter man for knowing what "not too hot" means. It doesn't mean ice cold or even tepid, and it doesn't mean I'm going to peel half of the roof of my mouth away trying to take the first bite. It means I could take it out into the street where it was raining very, very lightly and walk a short block and it would be at the perfect temperature to eat.