And the Book Tour

By Andrea Scarpino

 

“My head monk asked how it was walking. I said it hurt without shoes. And he said, ‘It hurts on the foot that’s down, but the one that’s up feels really good—so focus on that one.’ And I realized that all pain and pleasure is where you put your attention.” ~Deepak Chopra

The book tour: pain and pleasure, highs and lows.

 

After I read my poetry at Arlington High School, where my friend Gracie was a student before she was killed, a young woman asked, “Do you think Gracie would like what you wrote about her? How do you think she would feel having you talk about her all the time?” And the honest answer is “I don’t know.” And the honest answer is, “Maybe embarrassed. Maybe angry.” Another student asked if he could read his own poetry, and he did, and I complimented the shirt he was wearing, and he said it used to be his uncle’s shirt, that his uncle had died last year.

 

Which is to say I felt a deep sadness being in Gracie’s school. And a deep gratitude. And a hopefulness: all these other 17-year-olds with their poetry and grief. Pleasure and pain.

 

Joseph-Beth Bookstore in Cincinnati. Cincinnati, where I went to college, where the low-residency program in which I have taught for nearly seven years is based. I wrote individual emails to former professors, sent a press release and reading poster to my Cincinnati colleagues, invited my Cincinnati-area relatives.

 

In the audience: one of my students and his son, Gracie’s aunt and cousin, a wonderful mix of friends from the Women’s Center where I used to work, my partner Zac’s parents, bookstore customers wandering by. An audience full of loving faces: pleasure. An audience absent of poets, of the people with whom I daily work: pain.

 

So it goes.

 

I read from my book. My book. To big and small audiences. To people who have studied my words carefully and people who hate poetry. To old friends. To strangers.

 

And it is hard, sometimes, to read these poems filled with my grief: death of my father, death of a murdered friend, death of Gracie. To stand again in that grief.

 

The pleasure of sharing my words with others. The pain of sharing my words with others.

 

And I try to focus on the positive: the student who asked me to sign his book, the first poetry he had ever purchased. The man who said the only poetry he likes more than mine is Louise Glück’s. (“You should definitely like her work more,” I replied.) My father’s former student, who told me about visiting him in the rehab center after his strokes. The friends with whom I talk writing, publishing, books, with whom I share meals, drinks.

 

As Gracie wrote me when she was a little girl, “Andrea, these are all the good things.”