Norway

I'm back in Sweden after my Norway jaunt. Met with a whole slew of interesting critics and poets. I read with Kenny Goldsmith, A young Norwegian woman poet and a mohawked Michaux-translator from Berlin who wore a Anarcho-Syndalist logo on his shirt.

The Norwegians seem to read very dramatically and some appeared a little weirded out by the fact that I sometimes offered commentary between poems. Afterward a woman told me she liked my reading but didn 't think I should be so self-deprecating...

Perhaps the funniest moment was when Goldsmith read a text based on the commentary to an extra-inning game between the Red Sox and the Yankees. Afterwards he said, "most of you probably didn't have a clue what that was about." I looked around the room and he was right. Most people had a very perplexed look on their faces.

My thought about "Weather" is that it reminds me of all those Scorcece/DiPalma/Coppola movies from the 1970s when the weather report on the radio always seem to play an important mood-setting role. Maybe I'm just thinking of the one in which De Niro plays a crazy cabbie.

The other funny moment was when Nypoesi's webdesigner, when pressed about what he wrote, apologized that it wasn't very "conceptual" (for some reason they seemed under the illusion that my poetry was "conceptual" even though I kept telling them it was "anti-conceptual") - then proceeded to tell me about this program that rewrites a poem based on surveillance camera footage...