Coffehouse

We had the campus coffeehouse tonight—-it was a hoot. Very gospel revival type, rather livelier than usual. Less serious too, I thought, which was sort of too bad. But a former student of mine came back to sing, so we sat in the back and were the irreverent audience members--you need one or two in every crowd. Some beautiful singing, a couple of very interesting poems, good audience involvement--really a lot of fun.

Laura went up with me tonight to read. She read two poems from her school journal--the first was my favorite, a beautiful poem titled “Space.” She has remarkable sense of structure and rhythm in her poems, but not the forced dah-dah dah-dah rhythm that so many poets never get past. Her second poem, she explained, was “a humorous poem about a squirrel”--it was very funny, even if you didn’t know that she spelled the title character “squarll”(you’d think that child was raised in the woods). I am so proud of her.

My own poems went pretty well too--I had memorized them and remembered them both word-on, so I was pleased. One of my favorite parts of the night is when Laura and I were walking back to our spot, Will came walking up to meet us and said, “I want to go talk!” Cute little thing. I told him to get a little bigger and he could have his turn. I can’t wait.