Wed, Jan 30, later evening

With Laura arriving this evening, I went off to really the only offical "meeting" I'll attend here, for LitNet. Jim Sitter does vital work representing the interests of literary orgs "on the Hill" as he says and to the NEA generally. Would no doubt be dry stuff to some, but he's done a lot to help or maintain the NEA budget for grants to literary orgs like SPD over the past decade, and I found it very interesting. Maybe I'm a wonk?

(At the head of the table & head of Litnet, above, from l to r: Elliot Figman, of Poets & Writers, Jim Sitter in the middle, and David Fenza, who is the head of the AWP & thus running this entire circus.)

Then off to more directly poetical endeavors, a reading at St. Mark's by Dan Machlin and Jen Hofer. Dan's book is on Ugly Duckling ("my publishers") and he also runs Futurepoem and so will be at the show tomorrow. Jen's from the Bay Area but now teaching in LA, great translator of many a younger female mexican poet of late. Great readings, as expected.


Afterward to the Telephone Bar, apparently one of two traditional after-St. Mark's-readings bars, & talked to too many poets to number here (I'm also running off to the bookfair as I post this, & realizing how impossibe it'll be to keep any kind of tally of everyone I'm running into). But those I remembered to photograph were:



(Above, Julian Brolaski, former SPD intern & now NYer, and Michael Nicoloff, former NYer & now a consistent SPD volunteer -- he'll be at the booth saturday helping sell books.)

(Above, the fabulous Alana Wilcox, editor-in-chief of the also-fabulous Coach House Books up in Toronto, SPD publishers, and seller of 20 thousand copies, as she told me last night, of Christian Bok's EUNOIA. Possibly some kind of record for a book of constraint-based experimental poetry?)