When you hear a poet read her work, do you then read it differently?

Hear it in a different way? Understand it in a different way? The original is meaning and voice.



What is the original voice of a cook? Signature dish. Can you duplicate?

Is inquiry the linchpin for poetry?

Sorry if you missed Mark Doty's reading at SF Zen Center last evening. If you were there you recognize the rhetorical question. Otherwise read his FIRE TO FIRE, New and Selected Poems.





By the way, cooking is inquiry (of taste) and satisfaction (of hunger). Not much is rhetorical about food, I’d say.

Does a poem bend to will?

Does it bend to editing?
At its core is poetry like bamboo – quick-growing and flexible?




Perhaps, a poem is more akin to rice.

When you find unexpected moments to work on a poem are these stolen or freed?

Liberated verse or purloined stanzas? Does it matter. To the page? To the screen?


About food. On the spur of the moment whipping up a brown rice salad (because the rice is left-over). How does the pomegranate feel about having its seeds liberated in a moment of stolen time?

Do you know of a study comparing & contrasting poems written on the first and the last day of the month?

To what avail? Words are fuel but do studies feed the belly?




Word-rush and sugar-rush. Day after Halloween. Calories for a trilogy.

What's the connection between poetry & dance?

Integration.
Word & movement.
Performance.

When word is spoken, the dance begins.



When olive oil is heated, garlic unleashes its choreography.

Do poems scare?

In many ways. The obvious, Halloween. Ghoulish tales & masks. And words in and of themselves like raccoon and durian.

Sometimes what’s left out is terrifying.



About food, black & orange cupcakes don’t have an ounce of the lyric. Scare me. Always have.