Saturday night I went to SF for the Artifact reading. It’s once-a-month, the second Saturday. Somebody put the Poetry & Pizza email on their email list and, since I’m the one who checks the P&P email, I’ve been seeing their reader roster and now & then saying to myself, “I got to get to one of these.”
Summi Kaipa, Neelanjana Banerjee, and Emily Wilson were to read. I knew the name “Summi Kaipa” but why is an odd little story. I was running my name in search engines, as one is wont to do every so often, and I came upon this: “I'm looking for contact information for Glenn Ingersoll.” This was an email from “Sumana Kaipa” that Patrick Durgin (editor of the poetry magazine Kenning) copied to the SUNY Buffalo poetry listserv in 1999. I don’t know why Kaipa was looking for me eight years ago. But when I discovered the listserv email I became curious about her and looked around. She seemed also to be known as “Summi Kaipa” and had edited an Asian American literary magazine called, Interlope. (Last time I looked for it the zine still had a web presence; that seems no longer to be the case.) She also has work in Bay Poetics, last year’s anthology of SF Bay Area poets.
Saturday night I introduced myself to Summi Kaipa. No flicker of familiarity with my name was reflected in her face. Whatever reason she wanted my contact info has evaporated, no doubt. I did not tell her how I came to know about her. I bought her chapbook, The Language Parable, which she then read aloud in its entirety. I guess I’ll put it aside for awhile, read it again when my memory’s fogged up some. I also picked up Tantalum, a zine from New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment