Bah. I was working on this long and involved post about my night at Wednesday's poetry reading at the writer's festival but the words weren't coming out right and it was turning into a long way of telling a rather simple story. So now it is after midnight and I'm going to give you the simple version of this story. I was scheduled to work the box office again on Wednesday night. I wasn't planning on sticking around for the performances because it was poetry night and it occurred to me that I would rather swallow a splintered ruler than sit through 90 minutes of poetry reading.
On top of that, the only name I recognized on the list of readers was Christian Bok (there is supposed to be two dots over the O so it is pronounced like book). I had to read his book of poetry, titled Eunoia, when I was in one of my many Canadian Literature classes in university. I hated the book. The concept of his poems was interesting--he divided the book into chapters according to the five vowels in the alphabet, plus Y, and wrote a set of poems for each chapter that used words which employed any of the consonants but only the featured vowel (ie, no words with U in them were found in the A section)--but the poems themselves seemed rather nonsensical and just arty-fartsy fluff. Yawn. I planned to be home by eight.
Plans changed when I found myself in the golden presence of my Can Lit nemesis. Christian Bok, it turns out, is a beautiful, charming, and hilarious man who wore a suit and tie to his reading. He was like a perfect combination of Niles Crane and Michael Buble. Did I mention he was beautiful? Striking. Blond, fair and in a suit. I looked at him and I instantly imagined what it would be like to dance with him. Surely that man could waltz.
I had brought with me my copy of Eunoia, his book of vowel poems. I went up to him after the reading and asked him to sign it. I had to steal a pen from the merchandise table (okay not steal, borrow from the collection left there for people to fill out their door prize ballots).
He asked me if he could hold onto the pen for the night (he didn't have one on him for signing) and I said yes, explaining where it came from. "Thank you," he said. "You are so gracious," he said and touched my right shoulder with his entire left hand.
That photo beside his bio in the link I added does not do him any justice. If I was in charge of marketing him he'd be on cereal boxes.
Brought to you by the letter A, here is my poem for Mr. Bok: Ahhhhhh.
3 comments:
I loved this post, especially the ending. You are brilliant!
I loved this post because I love the book; that and the fact that Mr. Bök twittered the link that got me over here.
I recommend Crystallography by Christian Bök, a progressive example of the co-mingling of science and poetry.
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