Yesterday I participated in a master class with Charles Simic, the current poet laureate of the United States. In an hour and a half he looked at one poem apiece from about fifteen poets from the DC area. Apparently it hadn’t been well-advertised, which, ironically, is how I came to hear about it: one of the staff of the Library of Congress emailed David Gewanter last week because the class wasn’t full, and he forwarded the information to us students. I seem to have been the only one to follow up (I guess because so any people were out of town this week—and those who weren’t work fulltime, so couldn’t make a daytime class) and so I found myself in the room with a group of poets I hadn’t met before. There was one that looked youngish, but I felt like I was the youngest by quite a lot of years. (I thought this experience would have ended years ago...) There’s no shortage of poets in DC, that’s for sure…What I liked about the class was that Simic was much more interested in the poems than in the poets. I guess for most people (those wanting to make a personal impression on the poet laureate in order to help with their careers) this may have been a little frustrating, but I found it wonderful how much his attention was on the words themselves. I was pleased that he seemed to like my poem (“Fat Ben Jonson”—written for the lovely Anne Brumley, then in the throes on the aforementioned fat, literary man) though he did point out that, self-indulgently, I had probably used the word “fat” too many times. It was just such a satisfying word at the time. Still, he was right.
The other thing that I really valued was that we were all there to listen to his comments, and so no-one was trying to one-up everyone else.
I also got a chance to write a new poem while I was drinking a post-class coffee. Ah, coffee.
After a few hours break, I went back to attend last night’s reading by this year’s winners of the Witter Bynner award, Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn.
This was one of the best readings I’ve ever been to—both poets have published one book (Thorburn’s is Subject to Change and Youn’s is Barter), and each have second manuscripts that appear to be ready to go. There was such energy and playfulness—even exuberance—in their work. The audience was also clearly there with them—there was a lot of laughter. 
I bought both poets first books (again, hopefully in the coming months some more email interviews will unravel) and last night, on the way to Bistro du Coin, I read a third of Thorburn’s book. Again, I’m hoping sometime I’ll find a moment to at least post a brief review. Sometime.I’ve been realising just how many very good poets there are in America that we never hear about in Australia—it’s such a pity. Even big names don’t get much press at home. It’s still the case that most poetry is published by small presses—so of course a huge number of very fine poets don’t get distribution outside of America. It’s exciting discovering these poets—I hope other people will discover them too.
