I read at the open mic at the Iota series in Arlington, Va tonight with Claudia Gary Annis and Lo. Lo had never read her poetry in public before and was very anxious during an excruciatingly long wait, but she was great and deserves electronic applause echoing throughout the most distant precincts of Eratosphere!

[This message has been edited by Michael Juster (edited January 13, 2008).]

Congratulations Lo!

:)

Fr. RP

Go, Lo! Congratulations, all 3.

Way to go, Lo (rhymes).

David

Yay for all of you, especially Lo! Where in Arlington? (I went to high school in Arlington, about a million years ago....)

Lo! That's wonderful! Congratulations!

Well done Lo. The first performance is always terrifying. Now you know you can do it.
Congratulations.
Janet

Congrats, Lo! It's about time. I would love to have been there.

I read this board daily, but to post I always have to go looking for my Username and password so you know I was seriously motivated to send you my kudos. : ) And best to Dan, too.

Good on you,

Pat
(ImaginePat from old board days)

[This message has been edited by Jones Pat (edited January 13, 2008).]

I know,
oh Lo,
you set
Io-
ta all
aglow.




[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited January 14, 2008).]

Good for you, Lo! It is always scary to get up in front of people and do anything, but it usually gets easier with practice. I hope you found that the rush of having an audience for your work compensated for the fear of facing them.

Susan

Good going, all! How was the night in general--aside from you three?

Quincy

Lo, I know how anxious you were and am so proud of you for performing so well.
Mary

Quincy, it was funny as ever, and the audience was very friendly (as usual). Other formalists were also present, including Eric Hendrixson and J.D. Smith, and of course longtime Iota Poetry Series emcee Miles David Moore. The featured readers were Chris Conlon and Lyn Lifshin....

Maryann, it's on Wilson Blvd. in Clarendon. If you haven't visited that area in the last 15 years or so, you might not recognize it. Iota is a semi-dark bar & grill with Christmasy lights above the stage year-round. The place is better known for music (live bands).

This is one venue where light verse is always appreciated, even though it's not usually "featured." Mike brought down the house with his group of unusual greeting-card rhymes (it was published in a recent issue of LIGHT). Dan unfortunately couldn't be there because of a nasty cold.

But Lo was fantastic!! I hope this was the first of many appearances she'll make there, and elsewhere. And I'm so happy to have been there to witness the breakthrough!

Claudia

Thanks for the many votes of confidence......but I must confess, Claudia and Michael are being much too kind here. It's true - I did indeed read. However, I trembled and shook and shivered the whole time....not just my hands and legs, either. My voice suddenly decided it belonged to someone other than myself for some reason - and what is normally a fairly loud and confident sound became weak and small, and even worse, extremely quivery. Ugh.

Michael's poems and delivery were wonderful - ditto for Claudia. I am in awe of their courage and their strength and (most of all) the control they hold over their own vocal chords. I, apparently, have none of those things.

I've not attended many readings. In fact, this was only my third. It's so impressive to see these people, total strangers to one another, get up there and just do it and make it look simple and effortless and yes, even fun.

Personally, I'd much rather do 25 minutes of CPR on a 300 pound street person who's just consumed a large pepperoni and onion pizza and washed it down with a half gallon of MadDog while kneeling in a dirty alley in the middle of a monsoon with broken live electrical wires dangling a foot above my head. (which, if anyone is interesting, I've actually done - and with far more success and much less stress than I had standing on the stage in Iota for 3 minutes last night.)

It was fun to watch but I don't really think I'll ever find the courage do it again. It's one of those things that looks fairly easy but ends up being one of the hardest things in the world to actually pull off without either inspiring horror or worse, pity, in the people who are listening to you.

Next time I'll be content just to listen.

Many thanks to Claudia for inviting me and to both her and Michael for making me feel almost like a poet for an evening.

And a hundred-thousand wide eyed looks of awe at those of you who've read at these things more than once.

Ya-all rock!!

Lo



[This message has been edited by Laura Heidy-Halberstein (edited January 14, 2008).]

Oh, stop it, Lo--you inspired neither horror nor pity! And you sounded quite normal.

But I'm intrigued by your comparison of the reading to the CPR incident. Tell you what: Write that up as a poem, and read it at next month's open mic while pretending that the audience IS that 300-lb. homeless guy... that should do the trick!

Claudia

Lo--

I don't know why, but I've never really felt stage fright at open mics or as a featured reader. And I don't think it can be reduced to confidence in my material, or, for that matter, confidence in my stage manner, though I don't think either sucks. Public speaking comes more naturally to some than others--and it bears relatively little resemblance to how good they are. I have seen some embarassingly bad performances given by people who, judging by afterwards, clearly felt they'd accomplished what they set out to accomplish. Likewise, I've seen stunningly good performers obsess over how badly they bombed, and have wanted to shake them, yelling, 'Did you not notice the audience standing up and cheering?'

Quincy

But, Claudia, that guy ended up puking all over me.

All these things have bad endings.

Lo

Come on, Lo.
How else are we really going to hear your poems?