Link to the Show / Show NotesThese weekly readings arranged by the FSU English Department feature graduate students as well as a diverse and distinguished group of visitng writers. All readings are held at the Warehouse (706 W. Gaines) at 8:00 p.m. This spring semester Sami Levy and Steve Kistulentz are the co-hosts and the emcees.
I walked into Rick Campbell's reading a little late, but in his case that's just fine. It's not as though he stacks all the good poems in the beginning and the whole thing goes down from there because they're all good. And I can say with certainty that I never walked in on story about a Thanksgiving bonfire which used, as fuel, Anhinga Press contest entries. And the general commentary about burning being the greatest pleasure these manuscripts gave him! But he used his same dry sense of humor to talk about himself such as his battle with cancer and, as he said, that was surely worth a few poems. It was a wonderful reading full of the kind of living and surviving and near dying that preoccupies all of us poets. His humorous chatter off the page, which was always entertaining, belied the real tenderness of his poems.
If you go in search of Paul Shepherd's book, More Like Not Running Away, you'll also discover that he has a big fan club. Of his book, Bob Shacochis said this, "Shepherd is a master craftsman, and the subtlety of his art, the unassuming elegance of its architecture, rendered me spellbound and finally grateful. I don't think I shall ever forget this fine book, its honest, guileless voice leading me along into the fire." At the reading we learned from Janet Burroway (she introduced him), that Shepherd himself came from a rough background and there's something both rugged and disarming about his prose whether he's talking about the relationship the protagonist (Levi) has with his father, or how his father relates to the men at the bank. Shepherd is able to order language so that sentences seem like lines of poetry. In the beginning Levi tells us that his dad loves cantilevers. Since the story is about getting a loan to build a house, this sort of detail becomes important. Especially (and here's the part about poetry) when a line like this line comes along, "It [the cantilever] defied everything that tried to pull the building down" and you know it could serve as an epigraph for the whole chapter. It's this sort of lapidary writing that made for such a good reading.
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