Stephanie Young reads at The Poetry Center.

Stephanie's reading at The Poetry Center yesteday afternoon played out like a matinee. Stephanie read to a packed house of youngsters, the unemployed (me!), elders and maybe the homeless ("remember that microphone doesn't work!"). this was a very good reading. Stephanie read a "breakup" poem which she prefaced with possibly the longest epigraphic litany in poetry reading history.

Stephanie, were you quoting or was it you who said something like "breakup poems are necessarily serious"? i like that.

the poem itself, what's the title again? something like "Betty Page Stand Over There" is gorgeous. i didn't have my notebook to scribble in at the time but the poem gave me the feeling of walking into a room cluttered and crowded with collectibles. shiny and colorful things like cd's, clothes, television, exotic foods, the radio, pictures, people. like a refrigerator door covered with postcards, photos, magnets, fliers, notes etc. lot's of voices floating around, lot's of floating around in general.

the poem ends (or at least where Stephanie stopped) with the anaphoric "we shared" which is startling, and for a breakup poem couldn't be more numbing, devastating. if i remember, the last line of the poem is "and we were seperated/ at the airport". possibly not the line as it breaks on the page but definitly the line as i heard it breaking when read.

this was a good reading most of you missed. i guess being unemployed has some perks.


(ps. Michael Friedman read with Stephanie, but i saw Michael read the same chapters from the same book at Left Hand in Boulder last winter, good chapters from what seems like a good book that i don't feel like talking about, so there) okay, maybe one quote "blank and blank were like the Archie and Veronica of Naropa's Jack Kerouac School"