Wednesday, 10:30 a.m.
Encouraging the audience to move to the front of the room to hear Richard Robbins read, Marianne Zarzana said, "I think writers like to have people closer. This is not church...."
This was a festival celebrating rural writers. "As someone born in Los Angeles," Robbins said, "I almost feel like an imposter."
Robbins has published two books, Famous Persons We Have Known and The Invisible Wedding. He teachers at Minnesota State University in Mankato.
"Two more days of rain, the cattle frozen near Missoula," he read.
"I moved to Mankato.... It did take some getting used to...."
Of the poem "Fourth Person Singular:" "I felt as if I needed a new point of view when I got here...."
"Any town continues to pay its bills...."
"The first campaign I worked on was George McGovern, when I walked the San Diego streets sure he was going to win by a landslide...."
"I drank left-handed without you...."
"Did you recognize who cast the spells?"
"Every week Marshall Dillon saved the world. I didn't know he lived a few blocks away [from where we did]. My mother worked in the X-ray department at the local hospital. One day she came home and said 'Marshall Dillon came in with a fracture....'"
"I was too young to understand. These were the early days of metaphor...."
"I swear to God there was a guy on our wrestling team who could look at the scale and make it go down a pound...."
About 9-11: "The hardest part is seeing where the dark began or begins to end...."
"The poem that will make us love again...."
"Like a black streak of lightning, like a rush of love...."
"The truth was just a short night...."
"Every once in a while, you just want to purge. This is one of those poems...."
"He'd slice off an ear if Pee-Wee Herman would just stay off the news...."
"He was equally against poison ivy and grass...."
"Dick Hugo said that Poetry Northwest issued two lifetime rejection slips...."
"We become not the measured things but the machine that does the counting...."
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