Okay, maybe that’s overstating it, but it was a good Going Home to a Landscape reading. A better word is 'gratifying.' The library staff was happy to have us, and it showed in the fact that they brought us an audience (and that they brewed coffee, served cookies, set up a display of Filipino and Fil-Am books, gave us parting gifts and took about seven thousand pictures): forty-two people seated, a handful of others standing. Poet Angela Torres pointed out that it's nice to read at the library because you know that everyone there has a true love of reading. It's terrible when it seems like someone's listening only because it's too crowded at the magazine rack or because it's taking too long for their latte to come up. Not that that's ever happened to me. Ahem.
It was a treat to hear Marianne Villanueva read. At so many of these events she has acted strictly as MC, which is a disservice (although she’s hilarious. At the Bindlestiff fundraiser, she confessed—with a straight face—that her childhood aspiration was to become a bomba star) because her story, which she constantly refers to as "depressing," has a haunting/haunted quality that keeps you thinking for quite some time afterwards.
Next up was the quiet, fiercely intelligent poetry of renaissance woman Jean Vengua Gier. She read from Going Home, and then also read parts of "Marcelina," her 1930s-California-fieldworkers-violent crime poem from Babaylan, which she had never read to an audience before. It sparked an interesting conversation later during the question and answer session.
All I have to say about my own turn at the podium is 1) why do I never take a moment beforehand to practice the unintentionally tongue teasing line, “…I longed to shine the tarnished brass latch loose on its hinge?” I didn’t screw up, but the threat of it derails me almost every time. And 2) why have I never taken a moment to ask someone how to properly pronounce the word “capiz?” Is it CA-piz or ca-PIZ? Will one of you kindly put me out of my misery? Grazie.
Angela Torres read next, which was perfect because—as I’ve told her before—she bats clean up beautifully. She read from the anthology, and then read two newer pieces. Both were wonderful, but "Thursday, After Dinner at L'amie Donia” almost killed me with its loveliness. Apparently it has the same effect on other people, especially if those other people happen to be judging the James Hearst Poetry Prize, for which it recently took second place. You can read it yourself in the March/April 2004 issue of the North American Review.
We talked story and signed books for an hour afterwards, which induced heavy mother-guilt in both Angela and me (I also had daughter-guilt, since my parents were serving as babysitters). Several people bought more than one copy of the book, and one of them even brought along her clothbound version for us to sign.
I drove home on 280, listening to Seal IV and humming.
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