Up until the publication of my first book this spring, I recoiled at the prospect of giving readings and rarely did — not only out of a universal shyness at public speaking, but also, and moreso, from the acute sense that reading my poems aloud didn’t represent them right and that, without too much conceptual work or production, you could make simple machines of performance that could, as poet David Buuck says through these great thin walls of J2, “activate manifold potentialities in the work, such that each reading is both an interpretation as well as a further investigation into how the poem ‘means’.”