The ghazal in the garter

Found this article in the Boston Globe about the The Burlesque Poetess via the New Yorker book blog.

When Jojo Lazar bursts onstage, she's usually clad in velvet and satin, her glamorous 1920s getup accessorized with evening gloves, a fancy hat, shiny baubles, and, well, quite a bit of original verse tucked into her lacy underthings.

“No venue’s too small for me to take off my trench coat and say, ‘Choose your own adventure. Shall it be the sonnet in my brassiere or the ghazal in my garter?' ”

Now that's one way to popularize poetry. Take note, Charles Simic. :)

P.S. Oops. Didn't realize Simic's year as Poet Laureate of the US was already over. Its Kay Ryan now - a name I was not familiar with before today. How time flies! It feels like it was just yesterday that Simic took over from Donald Hall!

To quote our current poet laureate then...

"Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."

So..go forth and inhabit those lacy underthings ya'll! :)