Drama

The day I arrived, I noticed that I had a bump on the bottom of my left foot. It didn't really worry me because I had stepped on a thistle plant in my backyard a week before and I knew that's what was causing it. At the time it had felt like I got some stickers in my foot, but Marc, my husband, looked at it for me and couldn't see anything. So when I felt the bump, I just thought it was a sticker working its way out.

Last night during the reading, I felt my foot throbbing and started to worry about it a little. So when I got back to my room, I looked at it and decided that it didn't look great. I called he 24 hour nursing line on the back of my insurance card and the nurse, after listening to my story, said, "You need to get yourself to an emergency room."

So this is how, at 10 o'clock at night, I went to the ER because I had a sticker in my foot. What ever happened to being a kid, when your mom could just pick it out for you? Well, I lay on a hospital bed on my belly while a doctor picked it out for me. There were actually two of them, but he only got one out. Micro-absess, he said. I got a tetanus shot, a dose of antibiotics, a prescription and some instructions. Ah, the joys of being diabetic.

I did get something out of it, though. I saw the details of a story, not in my ridiculous trip to the ER, but in the people who worked there: A triage nurse who looked back at me with eyes like a malamute, unflinching pale blue. A doctor with concrete-colored hair and a calm, pleasant manner, who chuckled wen I said, "Note to self," as if he had never heard the expression before and picked the thistle sticker out of my foot with no trace of hurry, making little jokes that weren't as lame as doctor jokes usually seem to be. (A few days later this doctor called to tell me that the culture he had taken showed I didn't have a staph infection and that he thought if I was doing ok, that I could stop the antibiotics. I almost had the feeling that he was going to ask me on a date. There was a longish, awkward pause and then I said, "OK, then. Take care." I think it might have been when I said I didn't think I could give up going barefoot that he became interested.) F our different people came into my room. It was as if every time someone went out, they were magically transformed into someone else. Maybe just because I am running on so little sleep, they all seemed slightly off, like in invasion of the body snatchers, except that they weren't trying to make me one of them

Anyway, that is all over now (inshallah)*

Last evening before all of this happened, I went to the reading by Joe Millar and Claire Davis, a poet and a writer of fiction. Mr. Millar has white hair and has grown daughters, though he didn't strike me as old, and always seems to be on the brink of laughing at some private joke. At first, I didn't know what to make of it, but after listening for a while, I found it endearing. Earlier, he was a member of a panel that talked about giving a reading. One of the things he said told me more about him than his poems did. He said that sometimes when you are giving a reading, you look at your poem, which is about someone you love and as you are reading it, you think about them and how much you love them, and it overwhelms you and you feel yourself start to tear up and you can't read. He described this as the worst possible experience, something that doesn't feel good. He said it was like being caught up in the greatness of your own work. One of the other poets responded that it wasn't your work that you were caught up in but your feelings about that person, which was as it should be, since that was what inspired the poem. So as I watched him read, I thought about this, and other things that he had said while on the panel.

On the topic of poetry readings, perhaps I am spoiled by my own experiences listening to Rebecca from our writing group read poems in her carefully modulated voice, which clearly delivers to the ear the words of her poetry while not calling a bit of attention to itself, but I find all of this reading stuff to be a little over the top. It's as if some poets don't realize that poetry can be read just like other things. It is Shakespeare's craft and its meaning can be lost with a false reading. Pattiann Rogers said yesterday that the audience knows if you are not with your poem. It's the reason why I have almost no idea what is going on when watching Shakespeare performed by high school students, yet am memorized (Ed. Note: mesmerized) when watching the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Not so much because of these readings, but because of some other readings I heard today, I started thinking that any MFA program should have an acting teacher who could work with students to help them be better readers. On the van ride in, Ms. Rogers talked about how more people would appreciate poetry if they heard it read properly and said that many poets were not good at reading their own work. I think it could be compared to Chinese water torture to be read poetry for over five minutes by someone who rarely varies their cadence and goes up at the end of every line break. I don't think it would matter if their poetry were fantastic; I would never really hear it. (Mr. Millar did not do this by the way. I'm just ranting, mostly about some other readings I heard yesterday.)

I bought Ms. Davis' book, and she signed it for me and asked me about my own writing. She said to me, "It was nice to meet you. I'll probably be working with you at some point." I also bought a book of Ellen Bass's poetry, the one I had read a bit of before coming here. Abby bought it , too, having found a poem about a deer that took a bubble bath. Also, Ms. Bass is extremely nice and you want to buy her books even if you don't know anything about poetry. It's a bonus that her poetry is also the literary equivalent of a great amuse-bouche. Well, some of it is, but that really doesn't do it justice.



*I'm not Muslim, but sometimes the Arabic expressions for things just seem to work for me. I haven't said Inshallah for years. It means something like "if God wills". Usually I just say "knock on wood," but as a client at the office told me once, "Wood won't do nothing for you."