The army of high-powered agents, dodgy promoters, sycophantic managers, and assorted poetry-biz hangers-on who handle my bookings are still working on hooking up the big MLA reading, but through a series of power lunches and top-of-the-lungs cell phone conversations carried out as they cruise around L.A. and in their BMW convertibles they've managed to put a couple of appearances together for the month ahead. (Forgive the delusions of glitz and grandeur: I've been weathering the T.V. writers' strike by watching TiVo's seemingly endless supply of old episodes of Entourage).
The gigs in question are:
At 1:00 in the afternoon on Sunday, December 2 I'll be reading at the Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee with Ed Roberson, Jen Scappettone, Mark Tardi, Kerri Sonnenberg and other people from The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. It'll be like when the Cubs come up to Wisconsin to play the Brewers, except without the sausage races we've come to love at Miller Park. Unless I can convince Mark that we should suit up in our bratwurst costumes and do laps around the building.
At 5:15 on Thursday, December 27 I'll be joining Patrick Durgin, Kass Fleisher, Tim Yu and Bill Allegrezza on a panel about midwestern experimental writing at the Chicago MLA (that's panel 51 in the Field room at the Hyatt Regency). I don't think there will be any sausage races in the offing, but this is the MLA, the home of the prof, so there will be plenty of opportunities to see costumes as weird as anything worn by the mascots of Miller Park. In fact, I'll probably end up in the Hyatt bar, wearing some deeply compromised combo of threadbare corduroy blazer and stained-yet-beloved hockey t-shirt, perhaps with a french fry in my beard.
