Did you know that Evian spelled backwards is naive? <br />I myself was unaware of this fact until last Tuesday night <br />when John Ashbery, Marc Cohen, and Eugene Richie <br />gave a poetry reading and I introduced them <br />to an audience that already knew them, <br />and there were bottles of Evian at the table. <br />As air to the lungs of a drowning man was <br />a glass of this water to my dry lips. I recommend it <br />to you, a lover of palindromes, who will also <br />be glad to learn that JA read us three "chapters" <br />of his new poem, "Girls on the Run," a twelve- <br />part saga inspired by girls' adventure stories, with <br />characters named Dimples and Tidbit plus Talkative and <br />Hopeful on loan from "Pilgrim's Progress." <br />As Frank O'Hara would have said, "it's the nuts." <br /> <br />The poets' books were on sale and afterwards <br />two of the poets signed theirs happily and the third <br />did so willingly and Joe took photos and I smiled <br />for the camera, shaking hands with people <br />I knew or didn't know and thinking how <br />blessed was the state of naivete <br />my naive belief in the glory of the word<br /><br />David Lehman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/april-24/
