Poet B

is Kristin Kelly. She doesn't have a book, but I'd probably blurb it. Several people commented that they initially thought this was written by a male poet trying to write like a female. What I know about this poem: it and many others like it were written as part of a series--well, I'm not sure if that's the right word--of poems written mostly during the summer of 2002. Kristin and I wrote poems to each other and traded them via email for several months. These were mostly off-the-cuff unrevised "daily" sorts of poems. One thing we noticed at the end of our experiment is that we started sounding like each other--I can only guess that the "maleness" of this poem might be at least partially due to my influence at the time, or our trading of poetic identities.

Kristin would have been 22 or 23 when this was written. I've never eaten a meal with her--which just occurred to me and is strange. We've had only liquids together. Beer and coffee. She's currently at Iowa, but like many good poets, is originally from Kansas. She did her undergrad work (in Comparative Literature) at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where she wrote a very good poem about Dorothy Wordsworth.