One man was saying to a group of friends: "You'd be amazed what people share with their grocery person." On the other side of the room, a woman was saying to her friends, regarding the reading Kay Ryan had just given: "I hope that I got some of the jokes. I probably didn't." Later I heard someone say: "My main problem with ghosts is there are never dinosaur ghosts."

This was in a room on the second floor of Kane Hall, a high-ceilinged space with old-fashioned cluster lights and a huge organ at one end and a long banquet table down the center, piled with flatbreads and shrimp and tiny cakes. There was also a bar, serving complimentary wine. It had already been such a treat to see an hour-long free reading by the very wonderful Kay Ryan, who'd been introduced by the very wonderful Heather McHugh, that then to step into a room piled with free treats was, well, quite the treatment. Thanks, University of Washington Department of English!

"Thank you for that ridiculous introduction," Kay Ryan whispered to Heather McHugh as they walked into the reception. McHugh's introduction had been so dense with humor—poetry jokes and history jokes and many other kinds of jokes besides, plus some real-deal appreciation of Ryan's gifts—that Ryan's head, a few rows ahead of me, had been bobbing with laughter. And then Ryan got up and was very funny herself, so funny that afterward I felt exactly like that lady I overheard at the reception: I hope that I got some of the jokes. I love how intimidated that statement is.

"You cannot believe the eminences" the UW has invited to give the memorial Roethke reading since the 1960s, McHugh had pointed out onstage, and then looking at the list, she cracked: "They made one or two mistakes." Among the greats: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill. Ghost dinosaurs all, it occurred to me later.

A year or so ago, Kay Ryan went to Italy, and it made her think about the sometimes-painful, always-disorienting work the mind has to do when it arrives in a new place. Last night at Kane Hall, she read to us a poem that described this problem of being somewhere new, but not knowing how to be new yourself, as if you had put up an “interior tent,” only to find that “the new holes aren't where the windows went.” The poem settled as she leaned into the podium. “I bet you'd like me to read that again,” she said, and the audience fairly moaned yes. Yes, Kay Ryan, read it again. The sheer delight Ryan took from examining her own work—as though it were not her own but the work of some dear, deranged friend—gave the reading a wondrously funny edge, and allowed the audience to see Ryan not as the intimidating literary giant that she is, but as a warm, comic entertainer of the highest sort, able to humble herself through a kind of soft, conscious mocking. (After the first poem of the night, she mused, “I find that a very touching poem, but I'm ready to go on.”)

She began the evening with a set of new, unpublished work on subjects including but not limited to W.G. Sebald, frogs with dual pupils, octopuses, Thelonious Monk, and 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. Much of it she flatly insisted on reading twice, claiming that “if it's a poem, it should bear a second reading,” when in truth Ryan's poems not only bear a second reading, but seem to require it – so dense and rich with these double meanings you could feel the audience leaning in and curling around them, straining to catch every word and every space between words before the moment passed. (More than once I looked around and saw the people on either side of me listening with closed eyes.) Sometimes the second reading seemed to be as much for Ryan herself as for us, and the second reading would inevitably give a second meaning. This twinned reality—what Ryan calls “doubleness”—was the predominant theme of the evening, much moreso than the Northwest theme Ryan half-heartedly attempted, but (gloriously) abandoned. One new poem in particular, a beautifully creepy thing entitled “Ship in a Bottle,” possessed this doubleness in spades. Ryan introduced it by saying that the poem is still a mystery even to her. (Not being able to see the poem on paper, I‘ve inserted line breaks where I sense them, sacrilegious as that feels):

It seems impossible
Not just a ship in a bottle
But wind and sea
The ship starts to struggle
An emergency of the two realized
We realized
We can get it out but not
Without spilling its world
A hammer tap and they're free.
Which death will it be,
Little sailors?

“I'll read it again. It's a mystery to me,” she repeated. “I mean, it all makes sense, but I'm not sure what it's getting at.”

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(Travis Nichols reads at Elliott Bay Book Company on Sunday, May 19 at 3pm. It's free.)

Sure, sometimes a negative comment hooks into the meaty part of you. But it's not like the readership changed, that an imaginary army of cheering, adoring fans disappeared when the comment threads were installed, only to be replaced by a cantankerous mob of cretins. Now you get to instantaneously see how a small-but-vocal portion of your readers reacts to your work. Readers didn't have any unchallenged platform at all before, and now they do. Isn't that, on balance, really kind of cool?

When novelist and poet Travis Nichols worked for the Poetry Foundation, one of his jobs was to oversee a project in which comments were allowed on poetryfoundation.org. Perhaps the foundation expected an Athenian discourse about the nature of poetry and art in the digital age. And I'm sure the comment threads inspired some of that. But they also fomented a slew of bullies, off-topic comments, conspiracy theories, ax-grinding, and treatises on the sad state of American poetry. In an interview with Paul Killebrew, Nichols admitted that the negative comments made him feel "deeply, deeply bonkers for a few months, largely because I took a lot of the rote online bullying personally." The comment section was soon scrapped entirely, which caused several angry commenters to create their own sites accusing Nichols of fascism.

And now, finally, Nichols gets his revenge, in The More You Ignore Me, a novel in the form of one ridiculously long blog comment posted by our narrator, known only as linksys181...

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