Charles Harper Webb: “No Showman”
NO SHOWMAN
—Robert Creeley, 1926-2005
The auditorium must have held
a thousand people as I squeezed in
to lean against the back wall
at the Roethke Memorial Reading
in my first year of grad school.
I knew “Drive she sd,” and “Be wet /
with a decent happiness,” and so
was stunned when the one-eyed,
goateed god of poetry read in a flat
monotone that made me wonder
if his poems had been dull all along.
I found a seat as people started
to escape like air from a slow
leak—a few at first, then more,
faster. The room was barely
one-fourth full when, finally,
the finish came. And then the rest
of the audience dispersed
to dorms, apartments, houses,
lugging their own thoughts,
inspirations, disillusionments
till he was left with a few friends
who, one by one, said hello / goodnight
and walked away. Now he’s gone
too.
Charles Harper Webb‘s latest collection of poems, Sidebend World, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2018. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough, a gathering of Webb’s essays on contemporary American poetry, was published in 2016 by Red Hen Press. Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Webb teaches Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach.