In late answer to Meg's question, if anyone is looking for something to bring at last minute, I forgot to get beer. I am hopine there is some at house but I didn't check before I left.

I saw Jennifer read her poems 3x this week. Once at Kelly Holt's, once at UCDavis, and then last night. I really felt like I had to listen to them again to begin to say anything about them. They are hard and lovely poems. After the first hearing the sliding "you" kept getting me into some other place. And when I was fighting it, it wasn't working. But once I began to relax into the sliding "you," I felt I got them and they became rich and wonderful and they kept pointing at me and making me think why all the pointing. I still would need to see them on the page. But I left with a sense of the complicatedness of our relations, how we keep sliding into various yous.

I also love "the Occassion" and its big green sphere.

I remember when Imagination Verses first came out and everyone was like oh, is it avant garde enough? Or oh no, it isn't avant garde enough. And this book was really important for me to begin to realize that I didn't really care all that much about what was avant garde enough if it meant that I couldn't have this book on my side. That I wanted something else from poetry.

I also remember reading at the Writers House as U Penn with Chris Strofollino. Chris was late. I think he came in in the middle of my reading. He had taken the train down from NYC and he had read on the way down his copy of Imagination Verses which had just been published and he was all excited and he began his reading with "Cell #103"," a poem that still knocks me out. It begins "How many years locked up / does it take to create a Revolutionary? / How many a poet?"

I am wondering how to explain finally how Imagination Verses felt when it came out, to me and some of those near me, as a possibility. As a contested and prickly possibility. As a series of poems that said one could have tradition and one could have avant garde (as much as I hate that word) and still write however one wanted. Which is why I think I keep turning to "I remember..." phrasing. To explain this feeling of possibility might require me to talk about how things were back then, which would be absurd and self-aggrandizing. But I was for so many years lost in a who is the most radical contest (I’ve written some on this in "Editing and Community"). And to read the preface of Imagination Verses and to find "they were written out of a desire to engage the universal lyric 'I'" felt somewhat scandalous at the time. (Does it still? I can’t tell anymore.) And it had that feeling of freedom that sometimes happens when someone says something scandalous and suddenly other productive scandals seem as if they were possible, scandals unrelated to the universal lyric I. There were at the time so many essays around me/us about the evil universal lyric “I.” And while I still am suspicious of how often poems written in the universal lyric “I” can slide into narcissism, I don’t find that in Moxley’s work and I’m interested to think about what sort of work is left for this “I” which I think means looking at those using this “I.”

Also I've learned so much from those lines about how poetry is not for the passive; about how even the love poem agitates. And it is because of that line that I had to rethink whole poetic traditions that I had dismissed in the who is most radical contest.

Why is the luncheonette of language bullshit? To me it just says embed the poetry in the world. Or is a way of saying that poetry should matter somehow. And yet it is avoiding saying it too dramatically. I read that statement as refusing to say it doesn’t matter and yet refusing also to say absurdly that it only matters.