Reading at City Lights in Sylva

The literary Journal Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel is having a contributor reading on Friday August 3rd, 2012 at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC, and I am gracious to be part of the reading lineup.  Other writers speaking include Jennifer Barton, Pauletta Hansel, Brenda Kay Ledford, Dominique Traverse Locke, Chrissie Anderson Peters, Elizabeth Swann, and Dana Wildsmith.

It's been years since I've visited City Lights, and I've never read there before, so I'm excited but also a little nervous.  I don't know why, I've read my poetry in front of audiences many times, but perhaps its because there are so many talented writers joining me I wonder how the audience will see me.  I'm also the only guy reading in the lineup, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I believe Ernest Hemingway once said that all male writers were in competition with one another, though I've never been challenged to a boxing match.  Anyway, I think it will be a great reading as there are so many diverse and talented writers in the lineup.

Many thanks to Pauletta Hansel for her hand in organizing this reading.  If anyone is in the area Friday, August 3rd, you should come check it out.  Below is a link to the bookstore's website.  Hope to see you there!

City Lights Bookstore

Quotes from Carl Sandburg

I came across these quotes while looking through some old college notebooks. Sandburg had a way turning a phrase that is at the same time both absurd and astute.

"The man who knows everything has fleas in each ear and they look up the answers."
-- from Sandburg's Fables, Foibles, and Foobles


"What is shame? Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are...."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"Truth consists of paradoxes and a paradox is two facts that stand on opposite hilltops and across the intervening valley call each other liars."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"A celebrity is a fellow who eats celery with celerity."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"Fame is a figment of a pigment. It comes and goes. It changes with every generation. There never were two fames alike. One fame is precious and luminous; another is a bubble of a bauble."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg