read to me.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the reading marathon. Having been a graduate student in writing, I suppose it reflects badly on me that I had not heard of this before, but I had not, until she told me about the Melville Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum that she participated in earlier this month.

It was difficult, she observed, when the readers did not fully appreciate or understand the particular cadences of rhythms of Melville's prose, and there were times, as one might imagine, that the listening experience was less than pure pleasure. I was suddenly transported back to my years in my graduate writing program, which was the last time I attended literary readings with any regularity. Writers and poets came through town weekly, it seemed. There were frequent student and faculty readings, too, and for each one, we huddled into a black box space, sipped wine from plastic cups, and nibbled on cheese cubes, and for an hour or two, we were read to.

I miss being read to in a darkened room.

I miss the poets especially.

I started looking through my stacks of poetry chapbooks and collections. One of the first I re-encountered was Under Flag, by Myung-Mi Kim, and wondered if there were recordings available online.

Of course, there were, and I stumbled upon this: Lunch Poems.

There are many reasons to avoid YouTube. But today, I'm grateful for it. Enjoy!