Fall Girl--Recap of 'Poets in Full Meter and Note from the Heart of the Writers' Conference

Happy Sunday! Behind on sleep and bruised (more on that in a moment), I'm up early on the euphoria of the Writers' Conference. You might remember me gushing about last year's conference: it was surely the highlight of my year up to that point. This year, the keynote speaker is Rita Dove, a poet whom I admire and aspire to and see as a role model. In person, she reinforces all of those feelings: if anything, she's even more inspiring in person, as well as extremely kind and approachable, and I'm so grateful to get to be in her presence.

Phil is out bear-hunting (giardia notwithstanding: his level of activity that can count as 'resting' is always astounding) so I'll be biking out to the Conference venue in a little while here. I couldn't even have considered doing that this time last year, so I'm taking a moment to be glad of that: it makes our scheduling differences much more flexible.

Well, I'm holding out on you--I have to tell the story of the Poetry event on Thursday night: specifically, how I stole the show in the first set, but not through my poetry reading!

thanks to Terry for this phone shot

It was an awesome show: poetry, music, dance in various configurations and juxtapositions: crossing the genres and melding them together is such a dynamic and exciting space. As you can (maybe) see from the picture, we were performing in this beautiful studio, with a steep staircase overlooking the audience. Harder to see is that there is art everywhere in the studio, the dominant red-yellow color scheme everywhere; on every step of that staircase, on the wall side, there is a vase or other art object.

Why does this matter? Well, in the first set, very beginning of the show, there were five of us reading, and we made our entries from the top of the stairs, one at a time, until we were all standing there ranged on the stairs (the pic is from a different set). So, I started down the stairs as the second reader--and my foot slipped on the very first step, and down I went, and down, and down, and down, knocking the vases down like bowling pins or dominoes crash-crash-clatter. I had hold of the banister with my right hand and was trying to stop myself, but I had my butt kicked by ten steps before I finally came to a stop half way down, a cascade of vases rolling around the audience at the bottom.

And then I had to pick myself up, read my three poems and stand there for the rest of the set with a straight face! My one regret is that I didn't have a funny one-liner to defuse the tension of the moment when the crashing stopped--everyone looked so horrified, and I'm sure I did too: didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm just so glad that none of the artwork broke. As it was, I took a few deep breaths, and just went on and read as if nothing had happened.

I'm fine. My right biceps is super-sore from trying to catch myself all those moments and I have a giant bruise on my butt shaped exactly like the edge of a step. But I've still been doing pushups and working out with no trouble. And I'm still laughing about that fall--that night, after the show, Phil and I practically cried ourselves to sleep laughing about it together.

Before the open mic at the Writers' Conference yesterday, I had the opportunity to share that story with some other open mic participants under the general discussion of 'what's the worst that could happen?' A good share.

Do you ever think of a disaster or accident as a great story in the making? Are you good at coming up with a funny one-liner when something totally unexpected and apparently catastrophic just happened?