I just get so flustered when he starts in on U.S. foreign policy!

How to show up ridiculously late for two really good poetry readings in the West Village:

Wednesday. Be introduced to Time Out New York by a concerned roommate who has noticed that you divide most of your energy between talking to your cats and that scarf you're knitting. Take her advice to heart when she tells you, with the politesse New Yorkers have made famous, to "get your ass out there." Decide on a free reading by Zachary Schomburg, at the New York City public library on 6th Ave. Take the B train to West 4th, but avoid getting off there through negligence and absorption in the latest Newsweek! (To be addressed in a later post.) Instead, ride the train to Brooklyn. Look up from Fareed Zakaria, notice you're crossing a bridge, and realize that something is wrong.

Thursday. Go to Brooklyn on purpose this time, for Peter Gizzi, Cathy Park Hong, and others at the A Public Space poetry reading in the magazine's Dean St. office. Change your mind at the last minute because details about APS are sketchy and there's a reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, where the names aren't as big but there is alcohol. Take the B train, but throw yourself a nice little curveball by taking it in the wrong direction. Get off at Prospect Park and practice your cursing.

So I arrived at both readings with basically enough time to see them end, which was all right regardless. Seeing Ron Singer on Thursday night was more casual - bar atmosphere, a room full of poets who know each other. His work is humane and articulate, gently comical and full of enthusiasms (who knew that his reading would feature a brief lesson on how to say "Batman" in Spanish? It's Hombre Chiropteran.) But Zachary Schomburg the night before completely blew me away. His book, The Man Suit, features a blurb calling him "one of the sincerest surrealists around," and that's pretty much dead-on. It's rare to find an author who can, say, make you care about a love story between a lung and a haircut, or pull off a trick like introducing two islands to each other at the north pole. Dead Presidents, victims of repeated stabbing, animals in people clothes, lumberjacks and opera singers all coexist here in a delicately balanced symbiosis. Plus, he is extremely nice and still autographed my copy even though I came in late! Some of the book is amateurish; a few endings are too pat, a few reaches too obvious. But that shouldn't alter your enjoyment of it a single bit, and I'm going to prove it to you right now.

The Things That Surround Us

The entire world was there. The magnetic north pole was there. Prince Patrick Island was introduced to Prince of Wales Island and these were not the only islands being introduced to other islands. One room was completely filled with the space around all the islands.

When you asked me if I was an island, I told you that I was not. When you asked me to join you in the drawing room, I told you that I could not, that I was in fact an island and I couldn't join anyone anywhere.

Saddened, you revealed to me that you were not the two things that just outward into the sea as I had assumed, but the little bit of gray sea between them.

Then I told you that I was the entire Arctic Ocean sometimes.