Keith Waldrop @ Poetry Project

Great pleasure last night to catch a rare (at least for me) appearance of Keith Waldrop at the Poetry Project. He is one of the secret treasures — I wanted to say secret masters — of poetry in this country today. ّWell, semi-secret, judging from the large and appreciative audience that had gathered last night — but still, his work should indeed be way better known than it is. Maybe his new book, Transcendental Studies - A Trilogy, just out from University of California Press, will do just that. And don't worry about the title: before reading from the book, KW explained (hand pointing at where he was standing & then at something a bit further away) that something transcendental is something that "is not here, it's over there." I was enthralled by the reading, the quiet intensity, the accuracy of the saying, where, to misquote him, tropology maps topology — so much so that I forgot to video until nearly the end. Here, then, the last 40 seconds of his reading: