May
8
Re: pre-reading
I went to a Denis Johnson reading the other day. He read prose and poetry. He introduced one of his poems by saying that he had found the book in a used bookstore in Austin, and somebody had annotated the poems in the book. He was so annoyed by the annotations that he bought the book. The pre-reader had in fact crossed out sections of the poem and wrote “dull” by other sections. Denis Johnson kept interrupting himself while he was reading, pointing out these critical annotations, reading a line and stopping and saying, “This part is dull.” Or, about the second line: “This got an exclamation point! It’s the only part they liked.”
He finally admitted, “I’m going to end up ruining the reading of this poem, but I really hate this person.”
