A Change in Format

Well, there’s a poetry reading I’ve been invited to about a week from now and I’m sure I’ll go, because it’s a place I like, A Maze in Tchaiovna, and I go to poetry readings every chance I get, but this one will be different and I am just not sure about the format at all.
It will be a cover night. Everybody is supposed to read somebody else’s poetry. It’s really not hard, I’ll look up something I like and read it, or I could replay the Emily Dickenson/Gilligan’s Island thing I presented many years ago back when Alchemy was at that place on Slavikova that I forget the name of but you had to go down some steps and actually duck your head (at any rate anybody my height or taller had to duck, and I’m a pretty average height) to get through the front door, but I liked that place.
The thing is, though, that’s not the reason I go to poetry readings. If I want to read something by Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Burns, or Shelley, I can look it up and read it. Hearing it from the stage, by an overacting amateur poet, is not likely to add anything to the experience. I could be surprised. Hope so.
Most people, I suspect, will read more modern poets, most of which leave me cold, and there may be a smattering of the Beats, which can be good if given their emotional due. Some people may read stuff by unknown poets, perhaps friends of theirs, and that could actually be kind of great, if it’s any good at all.
We’ll see.
But, the reason I go to poetry readings is to read my own stuff, which I could gladly due far more often than anybody wants to listen. So, maybe I should stop bitching and enjoy this as one night of something different. It’s an extra, it’s not an instead of.