Tor house garden party
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If I hadn’t had a girlfriend at the time, I would have encouraged her overtures, but I didn’t encourage her, so nothing came of it. She came up to me afterwards to say nice things and to introduce herself. And at the time I don't think I’d started using my middle name for poetry publication yet.Īt that same reading, too, a really attractive blonde girl kept looking at me. The announcement misspells Garry’s first name and lists him incorrectly as president of the Haiku Poets of North America, which does not exist-they meant the Haiku Society of America. I wonder what my first-ever poetry reading sounded like, and which poems I read? I do know that, like the other three readers, I focused on haiku and senryu.Ī newspaper announcement about the reading, from the Carmel Pine Cone of, is shown here (thanks to Lequita for this newspaper clipping, received via Paul’s daughter, Anne Williams, in April of 2021, thirty-one years later). Thanks to Facebook, I tracked down Rick Chelew, and asked him if he still has access to the recording, but he says that some time ago he gave all of his Tor House–related recordings to the Tor House Foundation, so I contacted them to see if they still have access to that 1990 recording-but apparently they don’t, or can’t find it. I’d love to find a copy of this recording myself someday. I don’t have a copy of it, but this reading was recorded as “The New Pond-Haiku: The Art and Craft” and was released on cassette tape by Rick Chelew at the Oral Tradition Archives in Pacific Grove, California. The photos here are by Paul’s wife, KerryLynn Blau, both taken at Tor House, the second atop Hawk Tower. I would say the prestige of my poetry readings, such as they are, has been downhill ever since. I had no idea at the time how fortunate I was to read in such a series.
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We were the featured readers for that year’s annual Tor House Garden Party. I read haiku and senryu with Garry Gay, Lequita Vance-Watkins, and Paul O. It took place at the Sunset Center in Carmel, California, sponsored by Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation and Monterey Peninsula College. My first-ever featured poetry reading, aside from school readings and maybe a handful of open-mic readings, was on.