In case you wonder where I’ve been, I’ve been under the oppressive boulder of registration, which has pretty much consumed my attention for the last two weeks.  You know how bad it’s been?  I completely forgot to go to my writing group this week.  I didn’t even think about it until yesterday.   Dreadful.

Thursday night I was down in Columbus at the First Thursday Reading Series; I was the featured reader.  It was really pretty neat because there was an open-mic reading before me, and eight readers signed up, and each person read a couple of poems, so I got to hear poems by my Georgia Poetry Society friends Keith Badowski, Ron Self (who had also prepared an absolutely lovely dinner in my honor), Elsie Austen (who contributed the world’s best dinner rolls to that dinner), and Jo Middlebrooks, among others.

Afterwards, I read for about 20-25 minutes, and tried, valiantly (but not successfully), to make that little small-talk-between-poems that is so essential but so ghastly hard.  It might have been less difficult if I had chosen which poems I was going to read beforehand, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it–inexcusable, really, and I’m sorry about that.  (I hope my audience didn’t think too badly of me for it).  So that made me a little bit flustered.

But I did read a wide variety of poems (including several from La Petite Mort).  Here’s the set list, in no particular order:

• On Mathematics Hall
• Excavation
• Night Orchard
• Moth Walk
• Dystopic Love Poem
• Providence
• You Never Listen
• It Took You Half an Hour to Remember the Words “Wine Cooler”
• Solstice
• Imputation
• Ex Somnium
• Melon Stand, South of Many
• Bayous and Barstools
• Decidedly Unbridled Foolish Pleasure
• Old Kook
• Besame Mucho

Speaking of La Petite Mort, I really need to get with the program on that.  As in, photos, blurbs, and addresses.  *Sigh*