Walking into the chapel of St. Phillip Neri that Sunday morning was like walking into someone else’s hangover. A dedicated audience sat in the first two or three rows. Ron Whitehead was sitting stage right in his rocking chair, facing the action. Mark Lipman, the newly crowned Beat Poet Laureate, was manning the video camera. A few sponsoring artists and small press tables were still set up in the back. A man was stretched out in the third from the last pew, lightly snoring and sleeping under his ball cap. The air was attentive but exhausted.

When Amanda and I went by Friday evening, and I had the opportunity to listen to Lee Pennington perform, there was still Day 1 Energy bouncing around the chapel. There was a hum in the air. Day 3 Energy is a distilled resilience. My compassion for the organizers and producers didn’t change the fact that I don’t miss being the organizer and producer of creative events. Being the one with the clip board. Wandering around speaking to everyone and talking to no one. Juggling egos and people’s definitions of art. Handling the drunks, the over-caffeinated, the self-medicating, and the nervous energy. Sunday morning coming down was all about the strong finish. The production team was exhausted. I talked to Frogg Corpse, a fine poet I respect for both his poetry and his utter humanity, and he told me he’d been awake for over 57 hours. “The good news is I’m not hallucinating,” he said.

Thanks to Amanda being both my biggest fan and poetic champion, and because she’s much better at talking to people than I am, I was able to slide into a morning performance time at 10:45. We struggled a bit to make it. I worked the previous night and it’s always challenging to wake up at a reasonable time the next morning. We’re full throttle into the 2nd half of cruise season on the Belle of Louisville; the moonlight cruises are popular and the boat was full, the humidity was climbing in anticipation of the coming rain; and I generally have just enough energy to write, sleep, and work in some time with my family. I’d missed the window to get on the reading schedule originally, and while that was disappointing, I wasn’t overly worried about it. I really just wanted to dip in and hear some poetry and visit with some poet friends I don’t see often and one or two I’ve never met off social media.

I’m often cloistered from poet culture, because of the combined demands of my job and my anti-social tendencies. Because I take responsibility for publishing my own work, I tend to be outside the academically housed poet culture coffee klatsches. My tendency to eschew schools and traditions can make mixing with other elements a little complicated. I’ve got too much formal education to be embraced by many “outsider” writers. I’m a bit too feral to show up at Bread Loaf. It’s entirely possible that I overthink all of this. But it’s important to remember that poet culture is a minefield of fads, egos, and self-medicators. My solution is to focus on my craft and not worry about the rest of the show.

But I do like to get out and air my work, and Sunday reminded me of that. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my work with pretty much anyone, pretty much anywhere. And being able to perform in a place like the chapel, another diorama of the medieval imagination… that model of the universe with sacred stories etched in stain glass, high arches with divine images above the altar… was just such a treat. Thanks again to Elle, Kent, and Ron for thinking of me. And to Amanda, of course, for being such an amazing wife.