Day 10: Prairie Lights
UPDATE!
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Ever since I almost got stomped to death at a Nine Inch Nails concert in Iowa City when I was in high school, I’ve always had a perverse fascination with “The City that Never Stops Staring at You as You Walk Down Dubuque Street.”
The University’s mix of corn-fed football loving Lutherans from Keokuk and slumming writer-ly cosmopolitans from all over the world makes for some wild rutting, which in turn makes for some intense social energy.
As Tina Celona said on her blog for the poetry foundation (link to the Southwest of this post), Iowa City also presents the toughest poetry audience in the country (at least in theory), as they have the much ballyhooed workshop and a seasoned writing community that has seen quite a lot of writing in the past century, from Jorie Graham to Flannery O’Connor to every pretentious twenty two year old Norman Mailer wanna be in America’s recent past.
The reading at Prairie Lights was an amazing mix of readers—Cole Swensen, Mimi Khalvati, Anselm Berrigan, Gentian Cocoli and Anthony McCann—all hosted by Julie Englander, the venerable host of NPR’s “Live at Prairie Lights.”
Instead of writing about this particular reading, I’d love to hear from anyone who was there. What did you think?
I’m especially interested as well to know what anyone who heard it on the radio thought.
It’s been archived here: http://wsui.uiowa.edu/prairie_lights.htm
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First of all, Travis,
Julie Englander is a half-wit at best. She’s also rude. I wasn’t even there and I can tell you something with certainty: she brusquely cut someone off in order to say something for the precious radio show. Am I right? Other than that, I wish I’d been there.