One leaves NOLA Poetry Festival with love and gratitude for the thriving poetry scenes and groups that co-exist in this city—and the poets who commit themselves to nurturing and sustaining them.
With four hours of sleep to my name, after driving bleary-eyed back to Birmingham with Miriam, I am crawling into bed— but not before blowing my gratitude for the past five days to the hardworking board members of NOLA Poetry Festival, whom Bill Lavender credited with the festival’s continuance.
Starting at the end, namely, the Pool Party for Poets . . .
The moon over Rodrigo’s pool.
Dear Rodrigo, thank you for opening your pool to us every year and caring so deeply about poets and poetry and community. Maybe you will see this. May you won’t. Maybe you will find some time to recover from the chaotic beauty that swarms around poets.
Rodrigo's pool around 6:45 pm.
Talking to Carrie Chappell, Bill Lavender, & Amanda Murphy about NOLA poetry, past and present, was a delight.
As usual, I wish I had more photos, if only because I tend to be best at remembering names when there is an image attached.
Grateful to Patrycja Humienik for the poem that she is— and for taking this photo of me and Carrie Chappell that could be a flashback sequence in the film David Lynch never made about poets at the pool.
And happy birthday to Sam Beckett, who wandered through my mind quite frequently on our mutual birthday.
Of course the best games are the ones that have the capacity to surprise us, and before I bow out to share my black pillow with Radu, I leave a hint of games to come, particularly the surrealist THE GAME OF DEFINITIONS, first announced under the title “The Dialogue” in 1928 (or 1934, depending), as published in La Revolution Surrealiste, prefaced by the following observation:
A question? An answer. A simple process of give and take which implies all the optimism of conversation. The two interlocutors pursue their separate thoughts. The occasional affinity, even if contradictory, is imposed by coincidence. A comforting procedure, in short, since there is nothing better than to ask questions, and to reply to them.