tuesday night at lotusphere is chock full of parties and receptions. it is always a busy night. from what i can tell it is the busiest night at the 'sphere for that kind of thing. between invitations from ibm for various things, and invitations from business partners i always have more events to go to than i can possibly attend.

there is an annual dinner (for several years running now) that i am guessing not a lot of people know about that is put on by a company called symfoni. the fellow who puts the dinner on is trond-are utle. he had a blog a while back, blogging under the monicker "Air Play". trond is the COO of symfoni and a super cool guy. trond invites several bloggers every year to come along. his idea is that we are famous (or infamous perhaps?) people in the community and the employees and customers who are invited to the symfoni dinner "get to" hang out with us.

well let me tell you, from my perspective it is exactly the opposite. the truth is, i've had the immense pleasure of hanging out with some of the coolest people i've ever met, any time i've gotten to go to trond's dinner. people like arne for instance - one of the smartest guys around and a much more prolific blogger than me.

with trond having fed me at least three times over the past five? six? years... i started to feel a little guilty. i wanted to give something back. trond never asked me for anything at all, i just wanted to do something cool for him in return.

one thing i've been getting deeper and deeper into lately is poetry. i've been writing poetry on and off since high school, but the last maybe six years or so i've been exposed to a lot more poetry and a lot more poets. i've performed my own poems here and there, and whenever i do a reading it seems to impact people pretty strongly.

so i decided to ask trond if he'd like me to read some poetry at his dinner. i had a pretty good idea that it would work because they always rent out a private room, and the last few years there was a microphone.

the one thing i didn't think about was the fact that trond had never read even one of my poems. he'd never seen me read a poem. for all he knew i was some sort of hapless american idol wannabe poetry nerd. if you think about it that could actually be a pretty bad combination.

so. i didn't think about that. mainly what i was thinking was that i'd never done anything like this before. normally if i read some poems, it is in a room with a bunch of other poets. like at a coffee house or something. i was also surprised at myself for having had the sheer balls to write and tell him that i wanted to read poetry at his very expensive dinner.

neither one of us knew what we were doing. i just had this feeling like it would work, and that i'd be able to "give back" a little, and sort of "sing for my dinner", even though trond never said one word about anything like that. he always just sends me an invitation and is always happy when i show up. which honestly still blows me away.

well. it turned out that trond was more nervous than me about my performance. when i told him i might have about ten minutes of material he got kinda jittery! and who can blame him? for all he knew, i was going to go up there and recite some really boring lines. or maybe i'd trip over my own tongue. or do something really silly, try to sing or something. i mean there are a lot of crazy people in the world, and who knows, i just might be one of them.

so i tried to explain my plan. see, i had picked out three poems and put them together sort of like how a dj puts songs together in a specific order to get a particular effect musically in order to pull the crowd into whatever place they want take them. the poems i'd picked weren't meant to get people to dance of course. but they were chosen with intention.

the first poem was by a poet called rolf jacobsen. rolf jacobsen is a norwegian poet. i figured i'd read english translations of scandinavian poets out of respect for the people in the room, and as a way to connect them to the poetry. although later i learned i butchered the pronunciation of his name. :-)

the jacobsen poem i read is called the silence afterwards, and it brings the reader into contact with the kind of knowledge that is behind words. it brings the reader into silence, into a place in which a person comes into contact with the voices of trees and rocks - our ancient ancestors. the poem invites us to forget sales statistics and brunches and gas ovens, fashion shows and horoscopes, military parades, architectural contests, the possibilities of winning on the numbers...

people were discussing these sorts of things at the symfoni dinner. well not exactly, but you know, we are worried about a lot of things, and our minds are on technology, and how it impacts us. we're all making a living that way, after all, me included.

the second poem is one that i wrote myself. it is a poem about a poet called federico garcia lorca.

lorca was shot at the beginning of the spanish civil war by franco's men for the crime of being seen as a leftist, or for the crime of being gay. one of those, probably both. in the poem we go underground, to a secret place where lorca disappears and the soldiers cannot find him. it is an intense poem, full of both grief and triumph.

the third poem i read is by a swedish poet named harry martinson. it happened that karl martinson (the texas swede) was there at the dinner, and later he told me that his family had done a geneological search to see, among other things i'm sure, whether anyone in his family was related to this poet, since they had the same name. it turns out they weren't related. but i thought it was neat that he knew of the poet, and that the poet was important enough for his family to spend that kind of energy finding out whether or not they might be related. think about that! poets in the U.S. are certainly not held in that kind of regard.

martinson's poem, the cable ship, is a funny story with a fascinated meditative center about some guys on a fishing boat. martinson spent a lot of time at sea and wrote quite a few poems about that. in the poem, they've accidentally pulled up a transatlantic cable - a huge phone line running between continents. they try to listen to it:

"It's some millionaires in Montreal and St. John talking over the price of Cuban sugar, and ways to reduce our wages," one of us said.

they try to patch it with some rubber and let it go back to the bottom of the sea.

so the idea was, first we come into silence. we forget technology. we forget project schedules. we forget the banalities of the day. we move into silence. the knowledge that goes beyond words. foundational and intrinsic universally interpenetrating meaning from which we all spring and to which we all return. we connect to our ancestors, the trees and the rocks. then we go underground with lorca. we think a little about the struggle between ugliness and beauty. we remember that some people have died for poetry. we go down and down and walk in the land of the dead.

and then, at the end, we remember that we do live in a real world, with things like sailors and boats and transatlantic phone lines. we dredge up the line, with martinson, and remember that we do in fact work with technology, and we remember that it is good to laugh.

there was an energetic design too, here, something like a roller coaster. we get in, we go down, and then we come back up. simple, really. much simpler than the dueling dragons. :-)

but it worked. oh man, the whole room seemed to be entranced. even the people serving the food, i could feel them standing very still. everyone listened intently. later the ibm guy had to get up and give a little speech, and he said he wished he'd gone before me, because who could follow that act? he actually used the word "experience", that the performance had been an experience.

man that might have been the best thing anyone ever said about me, reading poetry. i hope i see that guy again. somehow i left there without talking to him.

after the dinner was over i was milling around with joe litton and i ran into this fellow who, it turned out, worked for one of symfoni's customers. he was a german fellow, living in sweden, super nice guy, very friendly. he had this idea that companies like symfoni must be going around hiring really expensive entertainers like me to come and liven up dinner parties like the one trond had just thrown. omg. that might have been even better than the ibm guy's comments. sooo funny. i had to explain several times that i was trying to pay trond back, just a little, for all the free food and good times he's given me over the years.

i'd like to point out though, that if anyone wants to hire me and pay me "a lot of money" to come read poetry at your dinner party, dude, i am so there.