read till you drop

Dan Wickett, over at his fab new blog (welcome to the darker side), has an e-panel with reading series directors. It includes one lovely and talented Erin Keane.

In response to one question she sez:

You know, usually our readers are an absolute delight, but of course there’s always one…. The aforementioned publisher did have a dud. This one guy, an older gentleman, was the first in a line-up of three poets. He had been rescheduled from another month and didn’t really fit with the other readers (he writes a lot of short meditative nature pieces while the other two are rollicking postmodern fun types), but we started to be concerned when he asked for a chair to sit in on stage. Well, OK. He might have health problems. Then he dragged what looked like a metric ton of poems, both loose and bound, up on stage, sat down, and proceeded to read for at least a half-hour. Our readers get 10 minutes each, and we have to time our shows down to the minute because there are other events scheduled for our space after us. We tried to catch his eye to give him a signal, but he never looked up from the pages. At all. It was agony, he’d give a 90 second set-up for a haiku. It was like he was reading to himself, no sense of the audience or the feeling in the house. Any time I think that the audience isn’t having the best time ever, I worry that we’ve lost them for good. The audience was one massive set of rolled eyes, and what’s worse, the next two readers had to cut their sets short because of him. I felt so horrible for the other readers because they had traveled to be there, too. Embarrassing and awful, and the Sit Down Time Bandit (who’s somewhat of a Big Name in Kentucky) will not be invited back.

A nice way to start the morning.