Michael McFee asked me to introduce a Birds of a Feather session at Duke’s NC Festival of the Book. Festival of the Book lost some points with me for this year’s tagline, “It’s About the Story,” since there were poets involved who didn’t really care about the story as much as the language, but that’s a piddling matter. Market your celebration however you want, people.

The session was intended to be a short reading and then a conversation around a certain topic between two poets, in this case Michael and Gerald Barrax. The assigned topic, Culture’s Sway Over Poetry, was significantly less fun than one might want to hear, so Michael and Jerry decided that they would speak specifically about music. And instead of doing a somewhat stodgy reading-then-answer-some-questions session, they decided that the reading would be their conversation.

Each came equipped with some poems, and Jerry read the first poem. Michael then found an aspect of one of his poems that shared a connection with Jerry’s work, and the two riffed off of each other like that for a while. Only once did they really hit a point where they felt like the work was not directly connected to the last poem read, and that was just an opportunity to launch in a new direction.

What resulted was far more fresh than your standard poetry reading– they really managed to have a compelling and thoughtful conversation through their poems, and I think the casual viewer probably suspected several times that they must have planned which poems to read in response. It’s a format that I would gladly see over and over again around any number of vague topics like music, family, the creative process… the kind of stuff that Festival of the Book was interested in presenting.

So, if you’re planning to have a few poets read, see if they are interested in something like that.

It’s been a good day for poetry, people.

Michael McFee asked me to introduce a Birds of a Feather session at Duke’s NC Festival of the Book. Festival of the Book lost some points with me for this year’s tagline, “It’s About the Story,” since there were poets involved who didn’t really care about the story as much as the language, but that’s a piddling matter. Market your celebration however you want, people.

The session was intended to be a short reading and then a conversation around a certain topic between two poets, in this case Michael and Gerald Barrax. The assigned topic, Culture’s Sway Over Poetry, was significantly less fun than one might want to hear, so Michael and Jerry decided that they would speak specifically about music. And instead of doing a somewhat stodgy reading-then-answer-some-questions session, they decided that the reading would be their conversation.

Each came equipped with some poems, and Jerry read the first poem. Michael then found an aspect of one of his poems that shared a connection with Jerry’s work, and the two riffed off of each other like that for a while. Only once did they really hit a point where they felt like the work was not directly connected to the last poem read, and that was just an opportunity to launch in a new direction.

What resulted was far more fresh than your standard poetry reading– they really managed to have a compelling and thoughtful conversation through their poems, and I think the casual viewer probably suspected several times that they must have planned which poems to read in response. It’s a format that I would gladly see over and over again around any number of vague topics like music, family, the creative process… the kind of stuff that Festival of the Book was interested in presenting.

So, if you’re planning to have a few poets read, see if they are interested in something like that.