My Adventures as a Guest Poet

This morning, I awoke at an ungodly hour to give a talk/reading to a colleague's poetry class. If you've never done so, it's a pretty strange experience to stand in front of 40 18-19 year olds at 8 a.m. and read them your own poetry and field questions. It was strangely obscene--this is what I do with "famous" poets in my regular lit classes. I couldn't help but feel a little self-indulgent, narcissistic, and so forth.

I read a single poem, "Hash Anthem," and fielded questions, and then two other students offered to read other poems, and a similar round of discussion followed. I ended up learning at least as much about my poems and my process as the students. Thanks, Ryan, for setting this up.

After class, three students came up to thank me personally--one woman, two men. The woman simpy smiled and said "Thanks, that was great!" but one of the men called me "brah" and the other "big guy." Only Paul McCartney and Dog the Bounty Hunter should be allowed to say "brah." Only Kenji Fukui should say "big guy," and only in reference to Ohta-san. That's what I think.