freetaco's blog

Near the end of my senior year in college, I still didn't have a car. When there were events and poetry readings in the small town down the hill from the university, I would show up early, hot and sweaty. Partly by accident -- I never knew how long it would take to get somewhere or if I would get lost along the way -- and partly by design -- I needed to cool off and get looking like a normal person before the event.

Not that "normal" was ever my forte. At one publisher's open house, I was glad-handing a lot of the older people who were affiliated in one way or another with the publisher. I was was talking the talk, as best as my 4 years of education could bolster. And then this older woman comes by and introduces herself as a critic and theoriest who had written a lot of articles I'd read on modernism. I let out a room-quieting exclamatory "Wow!"

In early April, 1994, I arrived early at the small gallery where David Antin, the famous "talk-poet" would be performing along with a slew of other poets. What Antin does is make notes about what he wants to talk about, and then he records his live 45-60-minute riffs on his notes. The recording is transcribed, and that becomes his published poem. Antin doesn't perform often and he produces only about a book every decade this way. He was riding high on the wave of a recently released tome. Sometimes you can find his original recordings and listen to those.

I parked and locked my bike, eager to hear Antin perform. I had an hour before everything was set to begin. I walked around, looking for a coffee shop or place where I could get some water. At a newspaper stand, I read through the security plastic that Kurt Cobain was dead. The details were sketchy. It was the late edition of the paper and they had just gone to press with the news. He was found alone above his garage in Washington. I'd never felt a kinship to him or his music, not in the way that other musicians had spoken to me growing up or even in high school. It felt like Kurt was somehow speaking alongside me. And in my private 45 minutes before the famous talk poet riffed on time or postmodernism or california or whatever I was alone inside a tragedy that wasn't happening to me at all, and not even around me, but somewhere I was very familiar with. In the tape of David Antin's reading that night, April 8, 1994, among the older and wiser poets laughing, you can hear a young man's heart breaking.

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This post written in response to This American Life's prompt "Tell us your stories about the things that can happen when you strike out into the world."

This blog is not entirely gone. I started it up when Vox first opened membership, but just have not had much to put down here.