The Best American Poetry

A Rose is a Rose (by Emma Trelles)

Mark's garden, Pompano Beach, circa 2007

Before my love and I decided to live together in a waterside condo, he grew these plush and inky fuchsia roses in the backyard of his duplex apartment.

The neighborhood was of the cracked-concrete-and-power station-on-the-corner sort, with sidewalks fringed with weeds and the occasional scraggly silver button tree. But his L-shaped patch of green sort of gushed with whatever he planted -  basil, mint, heather, petunias, and portly roses that would seem to appear overnight and blossom frilly and wide over the course of a week. They would last at least another 7 days after that, or at least that's how I remember it, and we took great pleasure smelling them before we went to work or on weekends when we'd sit on the terrace eating the spinach omelets Mark made for breakfast.

Those roses are one of the reasons he is the bee's knees; he can coax beauty from the unlikeliest of places. Another reason is that his roses reminded me of the ones my mother once grew in our front yard, in canteros, which I only learned recently means "planters" in English. Even though my Spanish is not the greatest, there are certain words I only know in Spanish, like gallegos -  what we called the tarnished gold beetles that buzzed along the window screens of my childhood home.

This is where my mother used to grow little and spindly rose bushes in all hues - creamy meringue, lavender, yellow, maroon, and pink. The flowers were no larger than a small apple, and they opened in the  dim hours before I left to elementary school. She'd cut a few stems and wrap them in paper and foil, then give them to me to give to my teachers. I don't quite remember handing them off, but I do recall what it felt like when she placed the fragrant homespun package in my hand, petals cool and still wet with early morning, her efforts at lacing our days with a bit of loveliness.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. You too are a forever beauty.

 
In the garden: me and my mom, always a hottie.

(Ed note: This post originally appeared on May 9, 2010)

From the Archive: Fear and Beauty in July by Emma Trelles

South Florida is the coolest part of the country right now, which is kind of spooky but not so much that I won't take that news as a bizarro blessing. Outside the rain is delicate and softens the world to gray and insistent green. I'd like to make a bouquet of grass or wrap its thick pelt around my shoulders. I'd like to hide in it for a while. My desk is beside floor to ceiling windows and I perch here like an invisible finch, never tiring of the view of trees and tennis courts, inlet and boats, the parking lot, the delivery trucks, recycling and garbage bins slicked clean. The windows sound great, right? But not so much when there's a hurricane. I've watched them bow, glass like lungs taking in and expelling air. If you have lived in Florida all your life, you usually don't evacuate for any storm rated category 3 or under. You are filled with equal parts savvy and foolishness.  I watched Katrina through these windows, days before anyone knew the fear and suffering that would accompany her.  We haven't had any hurricanes this season, not yet, so I can delay thinking about the 42 year old panes busting open, or buying water, sardines, and batteries, or losing hours to the local TV meteorologists. They call themselves storm trackers but I think they are sinister geometry buffs because they love nothing more than conjuring cones and grids and oddly pulled shapes that resemble lethal amoebas or a noxious taffy.

Instead of all that, I get to sit here and ignore deadlines, maybe take my umbrella to the park across the street. There's a hawk that lives there. We named him Joseph, after a bygone mayor of the little city where we live. This summer, Joseph has been observed grooming his wings, lunching on the small and feathered (his beak makes fine cutlery), and terrorizing the mockingbirds who also live in the park but are not so afraid of him that they won't dive-bomb his head in protest. Sometimes I walk through the park listening to the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, my summer anthem album, a gospel record, really, if you think about it. I sing "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and "Many Rivers to Cross."  I  hum "Sitting in Limbo."  Sometimes I stand beneath the canopy of a royal poinciana, which, when in bloom, hazes the space beneath it to a watery and pale red. This summer, I've been working and looking for work, doing and waiting, thinking maybe I should worry more, or less. There's no silencing the reel. I've been keeping modest lists: Go to bank. Call doctor. Hawk, storm, faith, here.

(Ed note:  This post originally appeared on July 14, 2012)

Fear and beauty in July [by Emma Trelles]

South Florida is the coolest part of the country right now, which is kind of spooky but not so much that I won't take that news as a bizarro blessing. Outside the rain is delicate and softens the world to gray and insistent green. I'd like to make a bouquet of grass or wrap its thick pelt around my shoulders. I'd like to hide in it for a while. My desk is beside floor to ceiling windows and I perch here like an invisible finch, never tiring of the view of trees and tennis courts, inlet and boats, the parking lot, the delivery trucks, recycling and garbage bins slicked clean. The windows sound great, right? But not so much when there's a hurricane. I've watched them bow, glass like lungs taking in and expelling air. If you have lived in Florida all your life, you usually don't evacuate for any storm rated category 3 or under. You are filled with equal parts savvy and foolishness.  I watched Katrina through these windows, days before anyone knew the fear and suffering that would accompany her.  We haven't had any hurricanes this season, not yet, so I can delay thinking about the 42 year old panes busting open, or buying water, sardines, and batteries, or losing hours to the local TV meteorologists. They call themselves storm trackers but I think they are sinister geometry buffs because they love nothing more than conjuring cones and grids and oddly pulled shapes that resemble lethal amoebas or a noxious taffy.

Instead of all that, I get to sit here and ignore deadlines, maybe take my umbrella to the park across the street. There's a hawk that lives there. We named him Joseph, after a bygone mayor of the little city where we live. This summer, Joseph has been observed grooming his wings, lunching on the small and feathered (his beak makes fine cutlery), and terrorizing the mockingbirds who also live in the park but are not so afraid of him that they won't dive-bomb his head in protest. Sometimes I walk through the park listening to the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, my summer anthem album, a gospel record, really, if you think about it. I sing "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and "Many Rivers to Cross."  I  hum "Sitting in Limbo."  Sometimes I stand beneath the canopy of a royal poinciana, which, when in bloom, hazes the space beneath it to a watery and pale red. This summer, I've been working and looking for work, doing and waiting, thinking maybe I should worry more, or less. There's no silencing the reel. I've been keeping modest lists: Go to bank. Call doctor. Hawk, storm, faith, here.

The Other Latin@: A Q&A with Blas Falconer [by Emma Trelles]

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity is an anthology of 20 essays that, according to its co-editor Blas Falconer, aims to counter a narrow perspective of Latino/a writers and honor their diversity. In his own essay, Falconer writes, "When Spanish enters the poem, it is often done because it is part of the memory, not because it is the language of the reader or of the audience."

This idea of how Spanish is mysteriously fused to the neurons of Latino writers resonated with me, and I wanted to hear more from Blas.  He and co-editor Lorraine Lopez will present the book this Thursday, April 26, at noon, as part of the Books and Beyond series at the Library of Congress in partnership with Letras Latinas and the University of Arizona Press. At 6:30 p.m., both Falconer and Lopez will read selections from their own work. For details, visit here.

ET: What was the source of inspiration for this anthology, for the idea that Latino writers are more than a globbed together demographic or a brightly colored (I'm guessing red) wedge in a pie graph?

BF: The book began, in part, as a presentation on an AWP panel I wrote in 2008. The acquisitions editor from University of Arizona Press was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and suggested we do a whole book. I told her I was thinking the exact same thing. We wanted to open it up beyond the Latino identity that's been seen through a small lens.

The book also originated from the fact that I didn't really understand my own relationship to the Latino community or to Puerto Rico. I had traveled there a lot when I was younger, but after my grandmother passed away I stopped going. I also knew that there was this rich Puerto Rican community in New York that I didn't feel quite in sync with because I grew up in Northern Virginia, and there just weren't a lot of Puerto Ricans there. As a writer, I kept asking myself, ‘Am I Latino?’ ‘What does it mean to be Latino?’ I have a white father and a Latina mother, but I have an estranged relationship to Puerto Rico. What does this mean? Then I realized that I saw two of my dearest friends as Latinas - Lisa Chavez, a Chicana from Alaska, and Helena Mesa, who is Cuban and grew up in Pittsburgh - even though they too felt disconnected. I thought, ‘Let's explore this.’ I realized that many writers were challenging the term of Latino in various ways, and I thought reading about their experiences might be interesting.

Another source of inspiration is that sometimes I just don't want to write. I'm on empty. But I'm still fueled by great poetry or writing, so I want to be involved somehow. Editing kind of satisfies that need. Seeing how different people write, how their work or books come together. It's inspiring.            

ET: How did you seek out writers? What was the criteria for submissions?                                                             

BF: The press asked me to widen the scope to include fiction writers, and I asked Lorraine Lopez to be my co-editor. We started thinking about the Latino experience and the Latino identity, and we wanted writers that subverted stereotypical topics -- food, grandmothers, estrangement and exile, urban life. We wanted to push beyond this and see what was next.                 (at right, Blas Falconer)        

ET: What's funny is that all those topics are in the book!

BF: It's totally true. But Lisa Chavez, who's from Alaska, isn't writing about the expected Chicana experience. In his essay, Steven Cordova  basically says, ‘I'm Latino, but I'm HIV positive and gay, and it doesn't mean I'm not Latino or addressing issues of otherness, but I'm doing that through this other aspect of my identity, through this other narrative.' 

In terms of aesthetics, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Gabe Gomez call on Latino poets to explore what might be considered experimental methods of articulating the Latino experience, which often relies heavily on narrative. So those topics are there, but they’re approached in many different ways.

ET: As an editor, do you find it challenging to reject work?

BF: I do. To be honest, we did have to pass on a few essays because there were a couple of times where they were redundant in subject matter. Another one was more for an academic journal in terms of what the press wanted for our imagined reader. No one submitted a bad essay, but some of them just didn't fit. It was hard because we didn't invite anyone to submit that we didn't really admire as writers.

ET: The tone of the essays in this book varies widely: "Latina Enough," by Stephanie Elizondo Griest is witty as well as reflective. In "When We Were Spanish," your co-editor Lorraine Lopez offers a kind of personalized scholarship. Did you both deliberately attempt to include a gamut of styles or did it just turn out that way?

BF: It kind of did just turn out that way. We were interested in not only the ideas in the essays but also in their craft. And we weren't just asking anyone to contribute; we were asking writers. So we encouraged them to write in the manner they felt best addressed their subjects. Gina Franco's essay is much more lyric, for example. It's a stunning essay and very complex in the way she addresses issues of identity.. Some were more academic, such as Peter Ramos’ essay, which had more of a rooting in the American cannon, more of an academic slant. And that was good too.

ET: In "Coyotes," Alex Espinoza writes about speaking at community colleges and remembering how he also sat at a workshop, at University of California, Irvine, and at the same table as Gary Soto and Helena Viramontes. What is the role mentorship plays in understanding identity?

BF: In my own essay, I kind of address this. When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that sense I saw them as models.

When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing diversity within itself.

ET: How do you as a Puerto Rican and Latino poet feel or do not feel marginalized?

BF: You know, I don't feel marginalized. I feel like everyone has had that experience of being "the other." I don't care if you're a straight white man; you've felt that sense of otherness. I don't feel any more marginalized than other people do at different times in their lives. I don't think I'm going to be denied a job or not be published or be dismissed because I'm a Latino writer. I don't think I'm going to be ignored. Maybe it's a testament to the strides the Latino writing community has made in publishing. Of course, I've experienced bigotry in my life as a gay man and as a Latino, but I'm not looking over my shoulder or waiting for the next person to shut a door in my face. But other people have had, and still do have, that experience, and I know that it happens.

The Secret Joy of Books

 

"A book ought to be an ice pick to break up the frozen sea within us."-- Franz Kafka

-- etrelles

The Tropical Roundup Gift Guide [by Emma Trelles]

Above:  store-bought bow and discount wrapping paper, pieced together with magic tape and love.

Yes, I know there's only five days left till Christmas, that by the time this post is completed Hanukkah is already twinkling its arrival, that some holiday shoppers are sitting smugly alongside their craftily wrapped presents, the kind with hand painted angel paper and chiffon bows and berries artfully attached.

But the Tropical Roundup is not one of these shoppers. She is on Cuban time, which technically means that while everything will get done, it will all happen in a great flurry, at the last minute, with some presents and cards assembled in the driveway outside the recipient's home. Wine will assist in these endeavors, as will cortaditos and pasteles de guayaba (both of which I'd consume twice a day if I didn't care about looking like a gourd).  One does not have to be Cuban to exist in this perpetually behind (but well fortified) state. But it helps, as does living in South Florida, where "Cuban time" is as common an expression as Turn down the a.c. and Coño!

Here are a few quick gift ideas for  those of us who consider Cronus a nemesis:

1. Behold the beauty to the left, a Great Gatsby tee from Out of Print Clothing, displayed prettily alongside my high school copy of the novel. My birthday, wedding anniversary, and Christmas are all within a couple of weeks of each other, so my husband is doomed to hunt for gifts for me throughout December. I assist (read: prod) him  with tips, such as this shirt I'd been eyeballing for about a year now.

On its website, Out of Print states that it "celebrates the world’s great stories through fashion. Our products feature iconic and often out of print book covers. Some are classics, some are just curious enough to make great t-shirts, but all are striking works of art."

Indeedy. Other choice picks include Thoreau's Walden, Darwin's The Origin of Species, the mysteries of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys (The Sign of the Twisted Candles and The Mark on the Door, respectively), and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, in a festive red and white.

 

To browse women's, men's, and kid's shirts,  visit here. If you select overnight or second-day air delivery, your prezzies will arrive before Santa does.

2. Last month I was lucky enough to read at the Miami Book Fair International and hear many fine poets, whose fine books I bought as well. I think you should buy them too, particularly from independent bookstores like Books and Books, Powell's, Politics & Prose, or whatever book shop is in your town and is battling Amazon, the real world version of the Dark Lord of the Sith. 

 Here's some of what I scored: Susan Briante's Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press); Sandra Beasley's I Was the Jukebox and Gerald Stern's Everything is Burning (both from W.W. Norton); Radha Says: Last Poems by Reetika Vazirani (editors Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar / Drunken Boat); Seamless Matter: Thirty Stills (Rain Taxi / OHM Editions), by Ravi Shankar; and Shapes the Clouds Assume (Kattywompus Press), by Jesse Millner, offering one of the best poems I've ever read about my home state.

Why I Love Florida, by Jesse Millner

 It's mostly because I'm a pantheist: like the Moguls I worship the sky, blue heaven that floats above me, like Whitman I worship each leaf of the St. Augustine grass, each blade a bright flag of this tropical world's dispostion, like Dickinson I worship the black racers along the dirt road I run most afternoons, those "narrow fellows" pouring their oily bodies into weeds that line my journey west, which is the orientation Thoreau argued for, the direction he walked each day from his shack at Walden Pond as he looked for that particular oak tree, the one whose branches filled with the music of God, which is a chorus of the natural world, a kinship with tree, flower, root, and earth, the hymn shriek of the osprey alighting from the slash pine outside my window last Saturday, yes, God in every thing, manifest in cypress dome or pine barren, in saw grass or slough, in the summer cumuli that blacken to nimbus and bring the hard rain that is itself the only true baptism, that holy hard rain, which cleanses this despoiled paradise, which roars into ditches and lakes that disperse and collect, but does not wash away our many and collective sins. 

3. Poster Art from Ironforge Press!  Give the music slaves in your life a chance to re-experience their rock-age, or gaze longingly at the show they missed, by purchasing concert posters from this Fort Lauderdale print shop specializing in flatstock and silk screen. Older stoners will enjoy AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Steely Dan, and Black Crowes; skillful tributes to Of Montreal, Arctic Monkeys, and Minus the Bear might appeal to the young and moustachioed set, but, really, there's no accounting for who's going to listen to what. Right now I'm listening to an Uncle Tupelo album recorded around the same time I was in elementary school (that last bit is a fatass lie).

Shop for posters here on Ironforge's main page and visit the press' blog for recent adds.

4. Finally, Radio-Active Records is taking orders all week. This independent record store sells a sea of vinyl, along with cds, turntables, and more. Here's an interview I did a couple of years ago with owner Sean Kayes and store manager Mikey Ramirez, who offers this little known bit of vinyl lore: "If you slow down the 12-inch copy of Madonna's Into the Groove, it sounds just like David Gahan from Depeche Mode."

Because plenty of its business is conducted online, Radio-Active knows how to coddle out-of-state customers. But they've got bricks and mortar too. If you live in South Florida, stop by for a vist, as did this groovy lady, who got Jesus (and Mary Chain) while holiday shopping.

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The Odyssey Project, Books IV - VI [by Emma Trelles]

 
 A Fantastic Cave Landscape, with Odysseus and Calypso (1568-1625), by Jan Brueghel the Elder 

Dear Stacey,

I've been slack in my letter writing because of work, which is, at the moment, attending to the sentences of others. I'm  sweeping clean the muddiness of poor word choices and useless repetition, employing the foot soldiers of concise writing: grammar and punctuation. It's tedious, but I also kind of dig it. It's a lot easier to fix someone else's mistakes.

But when the work seems insurmountable, I think about what else I'd rather be doing, or, to put it another way, what might be my own kind of Ithaka, "...the island of them all" - something that I greatly desire and whose attainment is continually delayed.  The promise of it keeps me going.

One of my Ithakas is riding my bicycle, a pearly white Raleigh that my husband gave me before we were  married. I love it so much that I instantly named it Pegasus, and soon after bought a bike bell, which I mostly ring just to hear its thick trill. It is searing hot in South Florida at the moment, the norm in late July, but when I'm on my bicycle the temperatures seem less oppressive, as does everything else, and I get to fly around town smelling the ocean and checking out the poincianas and palms and the little green parrots that like to nest and screech in both. I feel like the me that was once a 10 year old, skinny-legged girl explorer. And I suppose she too is another kind of Ithaka.

What I'm getting at is that even though I haven't been writing you, I have still been reading and thinking. Books IV-VI are my favorites so far. I like how the mundane tasks of servants are described in painterly fashion:

Here a maid tipped out water for their hands

from a golden pitcher into a silver bowl,

and set a polished table near at hand;

the larder mnistress with her tray of loaves

and savories came, dispensing all her best...

 

And also here:

"...but Helen called the maids

and sent them to make beds, with purple rugs

piled up, and sheets outspread, and fleecy

coverlets, in the porch inside the gate.

The girls went out with torches in their hands..."

 

Whether cooking, doing laundry, or making beds, no chore seems too mundane for Homer to depict with color and physical touch. Even scent is not overlooked, as when Eidothea, daughter of the god Proteus (and a nereid), dabs ambrosia beneath three lads' noses to drown out the "bestial odor" of the seal skins in which they hide. The ambrosia is likened to perfume, and, to me, the moment  hints at how man aligns himself with both the beautiful and the monstrous, how often the two can be experienced within breaths of one another.

 

"Eidothea," by Linda Carlson

I also admire the simple, fairytale connotations of these books' titles, such as "Sweet Nymph and Open Sea," although I don't recall Kalypso being so accomodating in other prose versions I've read of this same story. Perhaps I'm mixing it up with The Iliad? Somehow I remember Kalypso as a dangerous and seductive foil, and when I came across these lines describing her lair, I could see how Odysseus might be lulled into contentment, if even for a short while. 

Upon her hearthstone a great fire blazing

scented the farthest shores with cedar smoke

and smoke of thyme, and singing high and low

in her sweet voice, before her loom a-weaving,

she passed her golden shuttle to and fro.

A deep wood grew outside, with summer leaves

of alder and black poplar, pungent cypress.

Ornate birds here rested their stretched wings --

horned owls falcons, cormorants -- long tongued

beach combing birds, and followers of the sea.

Around the smoothwalled cave a crooking vine

held purple clusters under ply of green;

and four springs, bubbling up near one another

shallow and clear, took channels here and there

through beds of violets and tender parsley.

 

When I think about escaping my keyboard, it's usually to a green place like this, which I imagine as lit by candles and mirrors and old lamps. Once when I was in New Orleans, I spent quite some time in a store that devoted itself to that kind of light.  We had run in from the rain, and the contrast between the pale gray of the French Quarter and the jeweled glow of the shop was as precise as if invisible hands had placed each setting in its own frame, the former ensconced in a rectangle of simple pine and the latter in a baroque gold square.

Now I'm sitting here looking out the window, writing you, thinking about New Orleans and ignoring The Odyssey, and that poem by Donald Justice comes to mind, the one about how art casts its own light and how it can comfort us in our mortal, and thus temporary, sorrows.

I've always been easily distracted, finishing projects or cleaning the house in no particular order. Look, there is a cup on the balcony that needs washing.... let me clean the grime from this leaf.... this shelf of rags needs folding.... No one thing is started and finished in a continual surge.  And now I realize that I read that way too -- following a story, then drifting off into my own.

Yours, Emma

 

The Odyssey Project, Books I - III [by Emma Trelles]

                      "Cayuga Lake, Ithaca NY," watercolor by Nari Mistry

 

Dear Stacey,

I am in receipt of your letter and will say I was pretty tickled when I saw the first mention of Ithaka in Homer's verse because I knew that you were reading it from your own Ithacan abode. I wrote "Stacey!" in the margins beside line 30 and then again alongside line 213:

Another thing --- this too I ought to know --0

is Ithaka new to you, or were you ever

a guest here in the old days? Far and near

friends knew this house; for he whose home it was

had much acquaintance in the world.

 

This is my serpentine way of saying, yes, it is very cool that you're reading The Odyssey from the Finger Lakes region. Is it also a coincidence, then, that Homer so often personifies dawn with "fingers"? There are fingers of "pink light" and "finger tips of rose," and I gather that there will be more mention of dawn's pretty grasp in the books to come. I think if you read some of them at daybreak, from Ithaca, you might dream of flying over water, "in a clap of wings," with eyes faded to the grey of Athena's.

I had not planned on quoting so much of what I've read thus far, but I had also not expected to encounter such music. The sound of it! Sometimes I read lines out loud just to hear the iambic pentameter or a spondee, or some combination of both ("My word, how mortals take the gods to task!"). I actually scanned some lines in pencil, although I have not attempted to do any such thing since Campbell McGrath assigned The Poem's Heartbeat many years ago in graduate school.

Good god, I was an awful scanner and have probably flubbed the above line now as well. But I wanted to share with you how Homer's long song has inspired me to listen, more carefully and with less judgement, not only to whatever words I find on a page but to the sounds around me: the rattle of a maintenance man's cart, footsteps in the hallway. A spare kind of music.  It is so quiet here as I write this to you from South Florida; even the mockingbirds have taken a break from their summer chatter.

Yours,

Emma

This just in . . . Steve Almond interviews Emma Trelles

For anyone who has ever had a "day job" while still trying to pursue a career as a creative writer, click over to The Nervous Breakdown to read this perceptive and candid interview.  Emma Trelles, who regularly contributes here, is a working journalist and an award winning poet.  She took time to talk about making a living while keeping her poetry alive. 

-- sdh

 

The Tropical Roundup: Highlights from O, Miami [by Emma Trelles]

 
 
1. In February, I met with P. Scott Cunningham and Pete Borrebach for lunch at a noodle house. I couldn't find the place at first because it was lodged in the lobby of a motel on Biscayne Boulevard that, in years past, was known more for hookers and guns and rock (and I don't mean 'and roll'). But this neighborhood has now reinvented itself --as is also the city of Miami's custom-- into a hamlet of galleries, eateries, and indie mom and pop shops. There are things to do here besides driving by with locked car doors. Scott and Pete were working on their own newborn - O, Miami, the city's first poetry festival.

I ate basil and tofu and listened to their schemes: they were going to try to place if only one poem into the  hands of my hometown's 2.5 million citizens, regardless of whether they liked poetry or not. Scott and Pete were most interested in the latter, the possible converts, and they knew how to set the trap. They'd woo the city with a relentless courtship.  O, Miami would wrap buses with couplets, fly in W.S. Merwin, the sitting U.S. poet laureate, invite Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, hip hop legend Kool Moe Dee, actor-now-writer James Franco, and many more to speak and read, host collaborative art shows and a literary death match, surreptitously sew poetry tags into shirts at thrift stores, drop poems from the sky, rent a Ferrari. They had a lot of wild ideas. Had they locked it all down yet? No. When would the festival launch? In about 6 weeks and running the whole month of April.  I smiled and slurped my dripping and delicious noodles. I thought a) These guys are crazy. b) God, I hope they do it. All of it.