Had another successful reading tonight.

There are times when I’m on and I know I’m on and there are times when I am too self-conscious to make it work. Tonight was a night that I was on and I knew it.

I was the featured reader at Ragged Edge, a coffee house in Gettysburg. Dana Larkin Sauers, former Hanover, Pa. poet laureate, is the host and she is really good at making her featured readers and guests feel welcome. One of the things that I like about Dana’s ability to host an open mic reading is she does the open mic reading first and brings the featured reader on last, just the reverse of most open mic readings that I’ve attended. That’s a good way to do it.

What that does for a featured reader is it allows the featured poet to get a feel for who’s in the audience. You can judge by what types of poems other people read just where they are coming from and what their preferences might be. And you can “customize” your reading for the audience.

I started my reading with a reading of a poem from The Best American Poetry 2004. I think it’s important to do that. To read other people’s poems.

After opening with “King of Repetition” by Marc Jaffee. I then read some of my early poems from the late 1980s up through the late 1990s. Then I finished with poems I wrote while in Iraq in 2005 and during my trip to Germany in September 2005 while on R&R leave. I finished the evening with $20 in chapbook sales, which makes for a good return on the expense of fuel to get there plus money for an after-event snack and a drink for me and my wife afterwards. So the night pays for itself. I like those nights.

I said last night that I never know how readings at Ragged Edge are going to go. It can be a packed house or there can be a mediocre turnout. The turnout was mediocre, but it was enough. No telling how many chapbooks I could have sold to a packed house. But it’s summer time so those nights are to be expected in a college/tourist town.

Another thing that Dana does that I like is pass a hat to take up an “offering.” I’ve never seen this done consistently anywhere else. Dana asks for donations to give the featured reader as a sort “payment” for the night. That’s never expected as a featured reader, of course, but it’s a nice thing to do and I appreciate Dana doing that. I won’t say exactly how much was collected there, but it was well more than I collected on chapbook sales, which was a nice bonus.

My favorite part of the evening is always meeting other people and finding out what they are up to. I managed to get some feedback on the reading from those who were there and you know who is sincere in their feedback by the way they give it. It was good to fellowship with members of the audience over a drink and pizza while discussing how they like the rhythms I use in my poetry and the diversity and range of styles and subject matter that I put into the craft. I like hearing those comments because they validate my own efforts to work on those things. Hearing it said by people who experience my readings means that I have accomplished what I’ve set out to accomplish, that what I’m doing is working. I like to wish those moments upon others who find themselves to be featured readers in their towns.

As a final note, I’d like to add that one of the poems I read tonight, “Carcass”, was recently published. You can find it at Voices In Wartime.