The First Reading

He does his first reading at twenty.

The bookstore is in Northampton — small, independent, the kind of store where the owner knows every book and has an opinion about all of them. He has been in touch with her for three months, since he found her email on the store website and sent a note that was three sentences long: who he is, what he writes, whether she would consider hosting him.

She wrote back: yes, Saturday the 14th at 2 PM. Bring copies.

He brings fifteen copies. He arrives forty-five minutes early and helps the owner set up twelve chairs in a semicircle. At 2 PM there are seven people in the chairs. He knows none of them. They are strangers who have come to hear a poet they have never heard of read work they have not read.

He stands at the front of the seven chairs and he reads.

He reads for forty minutes. He reads six pieces from Freedom and two new ones that are not yet in a collection. He reads slowly and deliberately, looking up from the page the way he has decided he will always look up from the page. He reads to the specific faces — the man in the third chair who is nodding slightly, the woman in the back who has her eyes closed and is doing something with her expression that might be concentration or might be emotion, the teenager in the corner who he did not notice arrive and who is sitting with their arms wrapped around themselves in a posture that he recognizes.

He reads to the teenager.

He does not make it obvious. He does not direct all of his energy at one person in a way that would make them self-conscious. But underneath the reading, underneath the public performance of it, he is speaking to the teenager with the arms wrapped around themselves because he was that teenager and he needed someone to speak to him and he is going to be the person who speaks.

* * *

He sells six copies.

The woman from the back row buys one. She pays for it and then says: how did you know? He does not know what she means. She says: the last poem. How did you know that was what I needed to hear?

He says: I didn’t know specifically. I knew someone in the room needed it.

She nods. She goes.

He stands at the table with the remaining copies and the owner comes over and says: do you want to sit down?

He says: yes.

He sits in one of the twelve chairs. The owner brings him a cup of coffee from the back. He drinks it. The store goes quiet — the owner has stepped out, and it is just him in the empty chairs with the six unsold books and the coffee and the specific quiet of a bookstore after an event, which is different from all other quiets.

He sits in it for a long time.

He thinks: this is what it is for. All the mornings at the desk, all the notebooks, all the Holyoke nights when he wrote because he had nowhere else to put the thing in his chest — it is all for this. For the woman from the back row. For the teenager in the corner.

He packs up the books.

He puts them in the bag.

He drives back to Springfield.

He lays the notebook flat.

He writes about the woman. He writes about the teenager. He writes: the reading is not the performance. The reading is the delivery. You make the thing in private and then you bring it into the room and you give it away.

He keeps the line.

He does the next reading.

He does the one after that.

He has been giving it away ever since.

* * *

He thinks about the economy of this differently than most people expect.

He has been asked about money — specifically, about the economics of being a self- publishing independent poet, which are not favorable by any conventional measure. He has answered this question honestly in the few interviews long enough to accommodate it. The answer is: he works. He has always worked. The writing has never fully paid for the apartment and the groceries and the cat food and the notebooks, not in isolation. He has worked other jobs at various points, part-time, the kind of

work that leaves the mornings clear for the desk.

He is not romantic about the economics. He does not believe that the suffering of being poor for your art is in itself virtuous. He wants to make a living from the work. He is building toward making a living from the work. The website and the platform and the growing readership are all part of building toward that.

He is not there yet.

He is closer than he was.

He keeps building.

His hand finds the pen.

He looks at the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He is not editing. Not yet. He is reading. Asking: does this hold? Does it carry what it is supposed to carry? He reads the last paragraph again. The light has shifted. The afternoon is almost gone. His back is tight. He has been sitting too long. He gets up. Stretches. Sits back down. Ghost watches from the couch with one eye. Vincent looks at the notebook.

The operating principle: the work outlives the moment that required it. The language is what remains. He keeps at it. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

The pen is back in his hand.

He puts down the next line.

There is always another line.