3. Bang, Wheeler

As countless people have probably pointed out, Mary Jo Bang has a bombastic name. She is a small woman in person, and she reads in an almost-monotonous voice. I fell asleep through her last piece, a long one which is part of a project to slant-translate Dante's Inferno. Must remember to down coffee before attending readings after a full day of work. While being sick, no less.

For me, Bang's most memorable piece was an erasure-collaboration, as she termed it. Bang's father had abandoned/left her when she was four. After he died, she inherited, among other things, his unpublished autobiographical memoir. The phrase "all of a sudden" recurs a lot through the manuscript. Bang's poem, A Equals All of a Sudden, is a result of taking words and phrases from the memoir and adding five lines of her own to the end.

Susan Wheeler was a much more dramatic reader. She performed. Kept it up even when bookstore browsers were chatting or laughing in the background as they walked by. Playful, cheeky rhymes hooked me in.

Briefly spoke to Bob Holman, who was there for the reading, because I had seen his audio collection donated to a special collections library. He suggested first that I was born in the early 90s, then tried to place my age at 18? 19? It got very awkward after that. I didn't know what to say, or how to be joke-y or coy. I simply did what I do best -- shut down. He walked away from me to talk to somebody else.