Sermons, Conversations, and a Poem

What is it about me and the South African? He went and sat by the chair where my plate was already sitting and I was stuck. I tried to reach out to him a little. I think he probably alienates people with his tone and his formidable vocabulary. Some people can say a lot of big words and it's not distancing, like the poet Harryette Mullen, who gave a craft talk today to the writers. She used words that people out of graduate school couldn't understand and had to ask her to explicate. But she does it with such good cheer you don't feel stupid. Ricky said he's famous in South Africa as the premier curator of the country. He's going back there in a couple of months after seven years in the Pacific Northwest. His curating days are behind him but he wants to be where his friends are. We had a brief conversation (or rather I asked questions and listened) about friendship. He said after that he was done with his sermon for the day. Then he said it was actually his third sermon of the day. I don't know if he knows how to talk to people in a way that's not sermonizing. I'd like to put up a really smart, confident friend to speak for me.

Today I had a great experience with Harryette Mullen. I asked her to look at a poem and she agreed to do it over lunch. She had no obligation to look at anything of mine because I didn't come here as a poet, but she was good-natured enough to do it. She liked the poem and said it was publishable. She said I should send things to small and regional journals to get my name in print, and that would help me to the next stages, even for novels, she thought. Many things came her way just from having her name out there in the ether. She said there'll always be room for poetry that has something to say. She liked the water imagery in the poem. It was New Year Eve, Berlin, 1989.