Drew's reading was amazing. The poetry/jazz thing can easily be cliché, but this was about as far from that particular cliché as you can get. He scored his poetry like Mike Post might score an episode of Law & Order, if Mike Post were a more free-wheeling and improvisatory musician. The music was eerie and never distracting. It was improvised on some basic motifs for each poem, yet sounded remarkably tight. I loved his bass player, whose name I cannot recall this moment.

The poems themselves are amazing, on the page, but gain a great deal from an impeccable sense of timing and pace. This is probably the best reading I've ever seen in my life. Now I know why I hate poetry readings--they are not like this, usually. There are few poets who are as equally good at writing and at the performance of their own work.

I had a good time hanging out with friends and meeting some new ones, both at the CCCP conference and at the book party and reading. New friends and acquaintances include: Kaplan. Linda. Steve and Jennifer. Sawako. Rodrigo. Nada. Marjorie Welish. Lee Ann Brown. Tim Peterson. James Sherry. Alan Davies. I also saw others I had met before. David Shapiro. Douglas. Nick and Toni. Steve. Drew, of course, and Katie. Gary. Raphael. Pierre Joris. My cousin Ann.

It's pretty intense for me to see all these people in two or three days, when my normal routine is not to see anyone at all from the poetry world if I don't happen to run into Irby at Borders or in the hallway of the building where I work.