Samuel Menashe, reading

Today was a pretty slow day. I had brunch and then went to see the poet Samuel Menashe read at Downeast Arts Center at 4. It was very fascinating to hear him read, because he basically just recounts stories from his life and inserts poems spontaneously, having memorized them all. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether he's begun or ended a poem because they blend so seamlessly into his speech.

After that, I bought two books at 12th Street Books, one of my favorite bookstores where used books are priced reasonably (most between $2 and $7): Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare and The Secret Rapture by David Hare. I then went to the Starbucks on Washington Square, got a gingerbread latte, and sat and read the Hare play for a few hours. It's one of the plays that's required reading for the Churchill, Hare, and Stoppard class I'm going to take at all costs next semester, and it was very fascinating and fast-paced. It had some of the in-yer-face elements of plays like Closer but with more realism and convention. It made me excited to try to see The Vertical Hour, Hare's current play on Broadway starring Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy.

I've pretty much decided recently that I want to be a poet and playwright (in addition to whatever I do to actually pay the bills, which will probably be some sort of more conventional theatre-related job). My ultimate artistic goals are to be a published poet who reads regularly and a playwright at least at an esteemed off-Broadway level and a participant in the O'Neill Center's National Playwright's Conference. I've got an idea for a play cooking, and I've been writing some new poems lately, so I'm thinking vaguely of starting to read at open mics in the near future. It's just all so intimidating, because it's hard to judge how your work stands up next to that of others. Poetry is just so subjective yet not.