events to which no one came

I have scheduled events to which no one came. I have been scheduled for events to which no one came. 

One odd night at the San Francisco series I was co-hosting, Poetry & Pizza, the two featured poets did not show. Fortunately (?), no audience did either. 

For Clearly Meant, the reading series I host out of the Berkeley Public Library’s Claremont Branch, there was one reading with a total audience of one. Because he was intelligent and lively in the discussion and talked in an interesting fashion about his own poetry, I later scheduled that audience for his own reading. 

I have probably hidden memories of some of my own empty/singular audience readings. There was that one at a cafe in Cotati where the coordinator couldn’t make it. A friend filled in for her. But there was a table near the door that talked louder as I read, as though they weren’t going to let any dumb poetry reading interfere with their good time. No one shushed them. Why was I there? I asked myself. But I carried on like, I imagined, a professional. Besides my co-reader, a friend I’d brought along from Berkeley, and my husband and the host, there was maybe one person, or two?, that looked like they might be paying attention. 

I don’t know whether it’s reassuring to hear from others who have had similar experiences, or sad. 

Fanny Howe writes about reading for the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York City: 

I have read there a few times — always in atrocious weather (hailstorms, blizzards, and gales) — and have had a wonderful audience nevertheless. Once, however, when I was giving a talk, no one came. Ron Padgett recorded me as I read to him alone, and then a mad woman roamed in from the wet streets and tore my talk to shreds.

source:

Out of This World: an anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966-1991

edited by Anne Waldman

1991. Crown Publishers, New York