Circa 1966

Joe Ceravolo and I read together at the NYU Loeb Student Center in a Sunday afternoon series organized by Kenneth Koch. Joe read his poems over excerpts from Italian opera played on a small cassette player. I read from a long poem in progress, subsequently lost, that included snippets from that morning’s New York Times Book Review. (I recall Ted Berrigan laughing loudly in one of the front rows as he recognized the phrase “just one more piece of gone goop.”) Afterwards, Edwin Denby came up to Joe and me in the hallway and said, “How unusual — two young poets interested in history.”