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Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Reading at The Green Mill

So I read at the Green Mill. Very cool place but I should have known better. Not that the crowd was not nice. They were. They listened politely as I read from The Pitcher. But the Green Mill is the home of Mark Kelly Smiths Poetry Slam and not really the venue for novelists reading stories of a Mexican American kid with a golden arm and a broken down World Series pitcher.

Even my credentials sounded suspect. Why would anyone have so many awards and so much media attention if they did not sell out? Next to the rappers and the first timers someone with a  hardcover novel just doesn't have the necessary proletarian markers to compete. And there were the favorites and they ruled. Who was that guy anyway with the book?

But I appreciated reading there. I really did. I appreciated the guy (Mark) who I had met a  long time ago in Wicker Park and told me about the poetry slam. Maybe it is the discomfort of the novelist for anyone who doesn't spend years hammering prose into a long coherent form that eventually lands between two covers and must be accessible to school kids and critics alike.

Maybe it is simply the difference between the poet and the novelist.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Books by William Hazelgrove