Portland

October 30: Reading with Robyn Schiff at Portland State University. Smith Memorial Union 238, Portland, OR.

October 31: Doing a Q & A with Robyn Schiff at Portland State University, Neuberger Hall 407, Portland, OR.

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The Portland jaunt was short and sweet… Robyn and I flew up and arrived in the early afternoon. We grabbed a bite to eat about a mile from our hotel. Portland as a city qua city struck me as nice enough, but not the funky town I’d heard about; more like a state capital than Tallahassee, even. Someone put it well when they remarked it always seemed like a Sunday in Portland—not as much bustle on the sidewalks as one would expect.

Here is a picture of a funny hotdog stand in Portland—apparently in front of a courthouse:



The reading that night was lovely—about 30 people showed. Robyn’s reading was great—I heard her Ralph Lauren poem (on one of its many nuanced levels, a poem about the figure of the anti-Semitic or self-hating Jew) for the third time and loved it even more… her work just gets deeper and deeper the more one explores it.

After the reading, Robyn and I went out to dinner with Michele Glazer, who was hosting us, and Mary Szybist. I met Michele briefly back when I was at Iowa—her first book had just come out and she stopped through to read. At that time she was working for the parks service in Oregon, I believe; it’s only fairly recently she got into teaching. Mary I had met back at Iowa also—she had finished the program before I arrived, but stayed in town, where she taught high school. She had also started teaching (at Lewis & Clark) relatively recently. It was great to see these two and talk poetry with them.

Here are Mary and Robyn:



Robyn and a student (who was kind enough to give me a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth (“the math people vs. the language people”) because he thought it spoke to my particular conundrums):



The Q&A the next day was in some ways much better than a reading in that it was more of a conversation. It was great to hear Robyn articulate her poetics more fully—particularly her writing process, which is painstaking. Here are Michele and Robyn’s nice student:



(WiFi in the Denver airport, from which I am trying to post some of this, SUX. Maybe Obama can fix the nation’s WiFi system after he’s done with the war, the economy, and the environment…).