OK, I've been in Uris for two hours putzing around on the internet . . . I'm missing "The Simple Life" for this?

Down to business: Two poetry readings in GWS from a few weeks back.

Pilar Gomez-Ibanez read poetry and Seph Murtagh read a short story.

Gomez-Ibanez had two poems, "Fox on Lake Erie" and "That We Might Leave This Place." They were more phanopoetic than anything else. From "Fox," I liked the line 'That I might fall into your dizzying whiff of danger.' I am a collector of words, and hearing something that I don't have written before me makes for hard collecting. Maybe that's a good thing.

I thought it was unusual the way she prefaced each of her poems by saying where it was from, why she had written it, and what it was about. In some sense I thought it detracted from the poems: ones you've read the Cliff Notes, why bother with the book? On the other hand, maybe it's somewhat necessary to focus the listeners attention so they can better engage with the poem. I was left wondering if this was typical for poetry readings. I guess I'll just have to attend more and find out.

Gomez-Ibanez had another poem that she said was written about a Romeo and Juliet story that took place in Rwanda. The poem seemed to be more about fishing. There probally was much more to it than that, but I was daydreaming.

I absolutely loved Seph Murtagh's story, "Racing the Mexicans." A completely captivating, humorous, story with a marvelously sombre twist at the end. It reminded me very much of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" in it's conversational, free flowing style, its rhythm, and in its content/mood. But maybe that's just because Murtagh sounded like the man reading "On the Road" on my book on tape. Murtagh was a very dynamic speaker and his voice was very authentic for the narrator's character in the story. This made me wonder how much the way something is read influences how it is perceived by the audience. There is no way I could have read this story and made it sound as authentic or captured as much humor as Murtagh did. The characters he depicted really came alive for me, and he deftly wove dialogue in with the narration. A fantastic escape from the here and now.