A fateful Thursday afternoon

After class one fine Thursday afternoon, Robin and I were taking a stroll while discussing game theory when we happened upon the Lillian Vernon Creative Writing House. Fatefully, there was a poetry reading that day from a number of authors. We had the privilege to sit in for Mark Doty’s reading of poems from one of his books, titled Deep Lane. According to Doty, Deep Lane is named after a certain street near his Long Island home. Due to the fact that Robin and I were forced to sit literally two rooms away from Doty, I was not able to listen carefully until a few pieces into his reading. However, one poem that caught my intention was the poem titled “Ghost” in which he describes the eerie spirit of his family one afternoon in his kitchen. Before beginning the recitation, Doty claimed that he and his father had not spoken during the last few five years of his father’s life, which proved to set me in the right emotional mood for the poem. Though the exact words do not come to me at this moment, I do remember the physical alterations in Doty’s reading as the poem began to reach its more poignant moments. I think that what struck me so strongly about “Ghost” was how Doty kept his head down throughout the entire reading while in other poems he would come up for a momentary breath of air and a look at the crowd. I wonder why poems are not performed just as frequently as they are read.