rip roarin' good time

I always love reading at Eastwind Berkeley and Harvey, the owner, is always such a welcoming host. You can read more detailed happenings of the event from the woman of the hour.

At a party the day after, I recalled that Al's scroll poem was much like his poetry: a bold swatch of blank ink along a sheet of fine paper that goes on and one, meandering and returning. It's quite hypnotic.

And the sound of ripped paper is not what you expect coming out of a book store, and from the sound of the paper, it too was mighty fine, but that's the sound that permeated as Eileen made her way through the crowd tearing sheets from "The Light Sang as it Left Your Eyes". She had us imagine her walk out the door continuing to tear pages handing them to strangers, and one can only imagine then where the poetry would have taken her, and ponder too if she would ever return.

Tony Robles really is cultivating a Tony Robles style to his poetry with certain wit and charm from the cholesterol inducing ode to a short order cook to personal narrative on Muhammed Ali and his Uncle Ted.

Prau is an even lovelier creature in person. Having spent hours staring at it on the pixelated computer screen, there was a certain warmth to holding it. I kept staring at how nicely the blue came out for Michael Fink's design. And even lovelier still to hear Jean read from it.

I think this was my first reading in about 5 or 6 months. I posted it up on facebook. My co-workers found out about this life I have outside of work. And there in the cozy bookstore, those halves of my life met. It's a strange feeling, like when you introduce your beau to your parents. A slight awkwardness at first until someone dares break the silence and hopefully in a joyful way. Tis the season fortunately and it was joyful. whew! And I did get the Sound of Music song stuck in one person's head with my rewrite of the lyrics. sorry!

One of my coworkers bulked up on his winter holiday reading by buying a copy of all of our books. Thank you! Goes to show that everyone can have a section of Filipino poetry in their book collection and you need not be Filipino nor a poet to do so.

Wonderful too to see Cal and Leny come down from yonder. Always a long and arduous drive but then again having 5 Pinoy poets read at the same time gives a person a lot of bang for their gas mileage! Can I calculate that into poetry economics?

Afterwards we had dinner trading pictures of pets, grandkids, nieces and any other cute adorable pictures we each carried around. El restaurant, El Platano, es muy delicioso. Try the albondigas with the casamientos (fried black beans and rice, that reminds you of totong at the bottom of the rice pot). A yummy dinner to cap a yummy afternoon!