Last night at the Hugo House, New York City-based Cave Canem hosted a packed reading for AWP. The reading featured over twenty writers, most of whom came from the East Coast. But one of the best readers was from our own back yard—Colleen J. McElroy, a Professor Emeritus at the UW. She gave one of those readings where the interstitial talk was just as vibrant and memorable as the poems themselves. McElroy told a story about a secret she learned after her mother passed away: "I found out she was 101 [years old] and not the 94 that she told me."At first, McElroy was upset that her mother kept a secret like that from her, but then she felt "impressed" that her mother "kept this story going."

She also talked about how "a good poet has five good poems to write" in their lives, and so "they keep writing the poems over and over" until they perfect them. McElroy's poetry touches on morbid subjects (she read a moving poem about being the only person alive to remember family history), but she gets earthy, too. In one poem, a woman urges a prospective lover: "Let's go home and play zebra in the grass." The crowd giggled, seduced by her.

There were plenty of great performances at the Cave Canem reading, but one of the most memorable came from Danez Smith, who read a poem called "Dinosaurs in the Hood." I found an earlier performance of the poem on YouTube that doesn't capture the energy of last night's performance, but it gives you a rough idea:

Meanwhile, down the street at Vermillion, the final Breadline reading unfolded with an expected mixture of sadness and raucousness. Local poet Michelle Peñaloza, who is currently working on mapping heartbreaks in Seattle, read a few poems about being young and tragic. (One poem ended with a "duck, slaughtered for dinner" and "drained of all its blood, but not dead yet," staggering around a yard.) Sarah Heady's poems are landscapes, where the geography takes on the personality and the characteristics of a portrait ("This land is purple for want of you.") Often, her landscapes are dotted with amusement park rides; Heady read a poem strung together with the names of defunct roller coasters. I don't know if Peñaloza and Heady know each other, but their poems worked together perfectly to send off Breadline in style. The juxtaposition of horny lands and ducks leaving ichorous arcs on the ground in their final minutes felt like the kind of pairing that could only happen at Breadline. It'll be missed.

But there's no time to properly mourn Breadline's passing: AWP is happening everywhere. People are bumping into people and sparks are flying. In one venue, someone gives me a wonderful little impromptu history lesson on William Carlos William's influence on Northwest literature. In another venue, someone came up to me and said, with a respectful amount of awe in his voice, that "I just ran into Richard Russo on a street corner and had a long conversation with him." All these authors are hopping off the dust jackets of their books and running around Seattle. It doesn't get more magical than that.