The Forche reading was wonderful. Dean decided to go with me at the last minute, and really enjoyed it. Intiman was packed.

Her abecedarian "On Earth" (she called it something else . . . "the Bardo in alphabetical order"?) is not 24 pages long, but 48 pages long! She read parts of all of it, somewhat at random, a line or two or more from each page. It was memsmerizing.

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Our baby Star Magnolia is standing straight and talking to the tall one in the park across the street.

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A fascinating post over at Harriet about difficulty and the "hard poem." I love this anecdote:

"Kwame, I'm fascinated by this post. When I was at Iowa Jorie Graham was teaching a class called "Difficulty" or maybe it was called "Thinking"? It was supposed to be about difficult poems and how thinking works in poems. Sounded great to me. As I've said to my students: I have a pretty high tolerance for "difficulty" and obscurity in poems (although I'm not so keen on allusions). Anyway, after the first 2 weeks Jorie scrapped the whole syllabus and said we couldn't possible learn about difficulty or thinking when we knew so little about feeling. And for the next few months she only let us read and write haiku. I'd like to try to better articulate the kind of "hard" poetry that I like. Maybe in a future post... Thanks for bringing this up! RZ"