PRETTY GREAT FOR POETRY
We were standing, a big crowd of us, outside the door to the theater at Richard Hugo House, waiting there for the previous thing to let out, and it was taking a hundred years, and I looked over my shoulder, and there was Heather McHugh. She was the reason I was waiting. The Seattle Poetry Festival sort of radicalized this year, offering more events in more venues and bringing in lots of different writers, but, truly, the only Seattle poet I really ever want to hear read is Heather McHugh.
Standing around us were a lot of people I didn't recognize, although I don't go to many poetry readings because most poets aren't Heather McHugh, but, still, a lot of people. I mentioned this to her and she said, "Seattle is becoming pretty great for poetry." Festival programming director Jennifer Borges Foster was standing there too, and I asked her: How did you get all these people here? Publicizing it well? "Well, programming it really well," she said. How many people came this year? "A lot more than in 2005, that's all I know right now."
Linden Ontjes, who runs Eleventh Hour Productions, which puts on the festival, was on the bill with McHugh, although she announced she was merely a prelude: "I am here as the parsley on the plate. The radish carved to look like a rose." Christine Hume, from Michigan, was on the bill too, and she swore like fucking crazy, and before one poem said, "This I wrote even before I pushed a baby out of my snatch."
Then McHugh went up and ruled. She gave some anagrams for Seattle Poetry Festival (the best: Latest Leafiest Poverty) and said things like "I am nevertheless going to skip my suicide poems no matter how topical they've become" and then read lots of great poems in a row. Here's "No Sex for Priests," a new one: "The horse in harness suffers;/he's not feeling up to snuff./The feeler's sensate but the cook/pronounces lobsters tough./The chain's too short: The dog's at pains/to reach a sheaf of shade. One half a squirrel's whirling there/upon the interstate. That rough around/the monkey's eye is cancer. Only God's/impervious—he's deaf and blind. But he's/not dumb: to answer for it all, his spokesmen/aren't allowed to come."
MIRANDA JULY READING AND DANCE PARTY UPDATE
Also on the bill for The Stranger's event with Miranda July on May 17: the musician Becky Stark (of Lavender Diamond), the musician and performer Sarah Rudinoff (whose genius no one disputes), "Awesome" (men in suits with horns and such), and Joshua Roman (plays principal cello in the Seattle Symphony and is younger than you). It is still happening at Neumo's, and it is still effervescently free. 
