I went to see Hiromi Ito's poetry reading today. I really didn't know where to find the place, so I went early. I was one of the first three people there, so I was able to see the poet's "act of preparation." Funny, she didn't look at all like what I expected. She looks so young! And I even imagined her to be somehow dry-looking and bone skinny, but she's not.

Anyway, she went around the room, checking out the acoustics from every little corner it seemed, and the whole thing brought me back to Richard Chagnon's Concert Choir and Vocal Ensemble classes back at Mesa College. That's when it really hit me that poetry's all about sound and not about paper because Richard was always aware of all sounds. I remember he used to harp on us about our lack of enunciation. He always wanted us to overenunciate. "It may seem like you're overdoing it, but it won't sound like it, trust me."

And speaking of Richard Chagnon and such, I should probably explain my title for Assignment #1's Part One of Two. When I was in Concert Choir, we did African songs, and one of the songs was for a rite of manhood--or some other such thing. A semester later, I was in Vocal Ensemble, and my friend Chad was doing a solo for another African song in College Chorus. I haven't the faintest clue what the words were, but I still remember the tune. The poem is what I think I remember from it. I probably screwed it up terribly... thus the title "Perversion of Ancient Rites."

But I digress...

I actually liked the poetry reading, even though the poems were kind of long (I've only been to one other--at Mesa--and it was a very dull affair). There were, after all, only four poems in all, and she talked a lot about them and her feelings at the time she wrote them--all of this, in between each reading. She seems a great person; she's humorous and intelligent (despite her difficulty with the English language). I really liked what she said about family and the bigger family and also what she said about language. Who would have thought that I would ever start comparing my family to worms?

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