Depending on your time frame, this could be either 1) an announcement for an upcoming poetry reading, or more plausibly 2) a souvenir from my one and only poetry reading 32 years ago when I returned to the Pacific Northwest for three months during the summer of 1979. John Levy was living in Seattle at that time and was instrumental in setting up the reading. I think there must have been about thirty people in attendance.
The flier announcing the event is from the cover of my first book, Sentences, and most of the poems I read that night were from that collection, though I did read some translations I had done of Seferis' Mythistorema.
If anybody out there wants to pay my travel expenses, I'd be more than willing to return to the US for my second poetry reading! I'd even be willing to dispense with the honorarium. If interested, please submit your proposal within the next 32 years.
I too &also have only read once... it was in 1971
ReplyDelete&was a re-quirement at Johns Hopkins...
there was as with you about 30 people there.... if you dis-count the ones who were asleep there were 3hree
John wasn't there... he was living in the back-room of a friend's Ice Cream Shoppe in Kyoto:
YOU translated Mythistroema? all of the po-ems there-in?
I have the Keeley / Sherrard translation...
12 Bottle in the Sea
Three rocks, a few burnt pines, a solitary chapel
and farther above
the same landscape repeated starts again:
three rocks in the shape of a gateway, rusted,
(etc)
when you and John come this way to do that reading in 32 years hence
bring a copy and we can trade "Greek" poems, tell tall tales and dance the round dance...
if we can still stand
Ed,
ReplyDelete"if we can still stand"--that's a good one; in 32 years I'll be having my centenary but I could still read sitting down--or better yet--lying down?
Yep, my version of Mythistorema was in Madrona (#7, I think)--it also had quite a few Greek poets in translations by Kimon Friar who I met a few times before I decided to leave Athens for the boondocks.
Actually, I dance a mean Zebeikiko but my Syrtaki sucks, so we'll have to dance to Rembetiko music rather than Cretan. -:0)