Poem: On Reading with Jerome Sala and David Shapiro at the Zinc Bar Last evening [by David Lehman]

It was a
first rate audience
in every sense.

Jerome read first.
His corporate sonnets
reflect years of
labor that Marx
would characterize as
alienated in the
tall tower of
Time and Life
on Sixth Avenue.

There is beauty
in a cliche 
just as there
is humor and
then just to
clinch the deal
comes the rhyme..
Well played, Jerome.

The host beckoned.
I read second:
I read poems
in the manner
of Catullus,Herrick,
Goethe, Keats, Mayakovsky,
Millay, Stevens, Dorothy
Parker, Charles Bukowski,
and Kenneth Koch.
I also told
an old joke.

David Shapiro read
poems from his
new book including
"Why Rimabud?" and
conversed with the
darkness wondering whether
you could see
the darkness or
whether total darkness
was a poem.
"As Kafka wrote,
there is hope,
but not for
us," he concluded.

The mermaids sang
to him and
the crowd cheered.
All were glad.
Drinks were had. 

-- David Lehman

Comments

[lally]

thanks David....made me feel like I was there...which I was in spirit....got up that morning and dressed for the city and the book party/reading, ready to be a part of what seemed to be a seminal occurrence, and then the person tasked with helping me get there came down with this recurring cold/flu/whatever of the season...I was determined to risk the trip by myself but began coughing and feeling depleted, so finally surrendered to the reality of it all and sent my spirit instead while I went to bed and read poems from yours and Jerome's books, looking forward to buying and reading the other David's....