[Piazza San Marco: masks, tourists, pigeon]
Venice is a ridiculously beautiful city, as I'm sure you know whether you've been there or not. Even with the four hundred thousand other slightly lost visitors wandering through the winding passageways, the imperious tour-group leaders with their brightly colored flags held aloft on scary pointy sticks, the restaurant guys who try to lure you in several mispronounced languages into coming to their place for lunch, shop after shop after shop of masks and Murano glass and tacky tourist things--with all of that, there's nothing like that first step out of the labyrinthine shadows into the bright sun of the breathtaking Piazza San Marco.
I was in Venice this past weekend at the kind invitation of John Francis Phillimore, the "genial British expat" who has Old World Books, a wonderful antiquarian bookstore in the Gheto Vechio. John Francis also publishes a series of limited edition poetry broadsides/plaquettes, in which he has just included the first five of my Bar Napkin Sonnets. And since it was National Poetry Day in the UK last week, he invited me to come up and read some naughty sonnets. "Sex and the Sonnet" in Venice: a match made in heaven.
There's a really lively group of polyglot Venetians and expats who meet once a month to discuss things literary, and they were an extremely fun audience. Damiano wasn't able to come along with me this time, so John Francis asked Anna, an absolutely lovely lady, if she would read the Italian version of several of the poems. She did a terrific job, and it was interesting for me to hear the poems read in a feminine voice for the first time. And she didn't flinch, not even when "Millay [Went] Down."
And one of the loveliest things of a very lovely weekend: who should be in Venice working on a book but Joseph Parisi, who was kind enough to publish some of my poems "tanti anni fa." It was a real pleasure to meet him, and I was happy to read one of the poems that he took in that first batch, and to be able to thank Joe in person for having published it.
And now, after my brief Venetian idyll, I'm back in Rome, reacquainting myself with the traffic noises. But I'm not complaining, no not at all!
[Old World Books, Al Ponte del Gheto Vechio. The red book in the window is the Ashbery collection!]
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