Hello, thanks for coming tonight, all of you.
This mic good for me?
Closer.
Yeah.
OK.
That's a lot to live up to, that's all in the past.
Um, it's an honor to be reading for you
at this beautiful center.
I wasn't in favor of spending a lot of money on a Poetry Center
way back in the day.
But here I am reading at it, how can I say no?
Um, it's an awesome thing, so many things
go on around here and education in the schools, which
is really important to me and, um, all the volunteers
that are into poetry and it's just really a great place.
I hope you'll come here other times too.
Um, what was I going to say?
First, I'd like to thank the Mary Ann Campau Memorial
Fellowship committee for choosing
me to receive this award.
Pamela Uschuk, William Pitt Root, Tony Luebbermann,
and Rodney Phillips.
I'd also like to thank Gail Browne, who is very sick right
now and couldn't be here.
Um, she's the director of the center
and Annie Guthrie, Renee Angle, and Jennie Ziegler,
and the rest of the Poetry Center staff for all the work
to help make this reading happen.
I'd also like to thank my mother for reading me poetry
when I was a kid.
[LAUGHTER]
My big brother, Dean, who's here for being a Bob Dylan
aficionado.
Yay, Bob.
And my sister, Edie, for cutting poems out of the New Yorker
years ago and sending them to me with her letters.
And I'd like to start out by reading two, um, poems
by Mary Ann Campau.
One that shows what a raucous sense of life
she had and one that shows how she faced death.
Yeah, her books for sale, right over there.
This is called "At Mel's, One Mile from Mills College."
Ice glasses in a jazzed out bar, shapeless
room, all sweat, blue lit.
Dim, dim faces, rubber stretched.
Tables tipped to staggered dance,
tenor sax, a horny sound, syncopating.
Every drink on the rocks.
Fermented sex, drums beating.
Body hunger, honey, baby, take me home.
My kind of woman.
[LAUGHTER]
Take me home right now, please.
[LAUGHTER]