Poetry Reading Essay (Beginning draft)

View of Posterior Occipital Region with Scalp Reflected:
My First Poetry Reading

I attended my first poetry reading in my high school years.

In my senior year, I belonged to a club called The Dead Poets Society. Mr. Magrogan was the founder and moderator of our little brotherhood. During my one-year stint with the club, there were 6 members: my best friends Mike and Todd, Keith, Ray (the only one with whom I am still in touch), and a freshman who I didn’t get to know too well, so I don’t remember his name. We met before homeroom, one day a week, and we shared our writing or read the poetry of those we admired.

Mr. Magrogan turned us on to poetry readings. He would let us know where one was taking place, and we would all meet thee after school, each of us with poems to read hidden in our pockets, pretending we didn’t bring anything in order to have an excuse the moment Mr. Magrogan would say, “Why don’t you get on up there.”

The very first reading we attended was at Borders Books and Music in Towson. The reading was in the café on the second floor. We stood on the elevated section, outside the café, looking down on the readers from a railing aside the True Crime section.

Instead of paying attention to what the poets had to say, I split my time between nagging Todd to read and flipping through a book on the Kennedy assassination. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was an early foray into a lifelong fascination with the events of November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Had I not been so disturbed by the company one keeps after going down the grassy knoll rabbit hole, I could just as easily have been a conspiracy theorist instead of a poet.

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I have been to countless poetry readings since that first night in Towson, and I have taken from the experiences this one unmitigated exegesis (read: wisecrack) about poetry:

If your poems aren’t JFK autopsy photos, don’t bother.