Kim Addonizio on Tour
Last week Kim Addonizio came to Grass Valley (the town next door to me) and got on stage with her black boots and mesh fingerless gloves and tattoos and purple lipstick and whatnot and gave a fabulous reading. I love Kim and I love her poetry, and I am about to start loving her fiction, from which she read that night. I think her tough-girl persona is funny, and a lovely contrast to the sometimes tough-girl but always better-crafted-than-you-can-believe poems she writes. (And why should tough and disciplined be incompatible?) I took quite a few classes with her in the early ’90s when she and Dorianne (Laux) were teaching one-day weekend classes on various themes — these turned into their book, The Poet’s Companion, which you should look at if you are a beginning poet (and I still look at it a lot).
Kim’s also a harmonica student, and since I’d seen her play — maybe five years ago in Sacramento — she’s gotten a lot better, much closer to the real-harmonica-player-on-stage-with-other-musicians level. She read alternately from her novel Little Beauties and different old and very new poems, and played some harmonica, and wove the whole thing into a wonderful pattern over the course of an hour. I love the way someone who’s good with an audience will just persist — Kim was funny but not trying to be funny, flirtatious but sort of offhandedly so, and explained just enough about her personal life and the background to the writing to give us a good perspective, but not so much that she detracted from the actual reading (this is a tough balance for many writers to maintain). I cried once and laughed about thirty-seven times and paid close attention.
The useful thing she said in the Q&A was that in order to get better at writing you have to practice. You have to write and write and write. She is always asked questions about writing as if there were a secret to it, a key that writers know and aspiring writers are desperate for. She said, “There’s no secret. It’s work.”
I have no intention of ever getting a tattoo. But if I did get one, it would be that line, tattooed to the inside of my forehead.
So keep writing, and don’t stop. And read Kim’s book “Tell Me” if you haven’t already.
xox Molly