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Nominally mathematical. How long you can keep your head under water. High-brow, or purple either for that matter, in writing, is the kiss of death. What you'll put up with, how long you'll listen. Three readings, I remember, where the audience wouldn't let the poets go, demanded more. All very different. One was on an island, mid-winter, the ocean was frozen all the way to the mainland and the ferry couldn't run. There was nothing, beyond those habits of self, to do. Cabin fever. Three of us reading, and it was supposed to be an hour, which is a long time to listen to poetry. When one of my poet friends sends me a new book, I leave it on the counter, read a few poems, a few lines, then, at some point, I take it over to the sofa and read through the whole thing at a sitting, with breaks to roll a smoke and get a drink. An hour is a long time to listen intently. But that night, they wouldn't let us go, they asked to hear certain poems again (an important point) and kept us for hours, as the snow accumulated. Another was earlier, the lost years, LSD wasn't yet illegal, and I was tripped out, Harvey was reading with me, and Glenn was playing some strange Chinese string instrument; he never did drugs, but he'd smoked some hash that day, because he liked the way it smelled or liked the way it felt, or something. We were supposed to 'perform' for two classes, an hour apart, but the first kids all stayed and joined the second kids, and we read until we were horse, hours later. The third, that I remember, I remember most vividly. The day that I left my family. I wrote two books that awful year, and I was sitting on the tailgate of my truck, saying goodbye to six or eight close friends, drinking a beer, headed toward who knows what. One of them asked me to read some recent poems, and then they wouldn't let me go, until I read them both books. I crossed the Rockies, over Monarch Pass, and was well into Kansas before I forgot their tears. So I know it's possible, for poetry to make a difference, but difficult at best. With the steamboat show, what I learned, is to place things within perspective. What did who wear and what's for dinner. The background is important. Compare Virginia Wolfe with George V. Higgens; "To The Lighthouse" is at least an equal to "The Heart Of Darkness"; "The Friends of Eddy Coyle", come on. No one ever wrote dialog like that. Conversation is what engages us, read what Emily says in her letters. Context is everything. And nothing, at the same time. Maybe a clue, who knows.