The publisher visits Green Apple bookstore

When the publisher visited Green Apple, the poets were happy to see him.

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The place was jammed.

He took a seat near Brenda Hillman, a poet with whom he was not familiar, and began to read from her book, 'Pieces of Air in the Epic'.

Bravely, so bravely, he balanced himself on one of Hillman's poems, "Altamont", (right) and started to walk from the beginning to the end. As you can imagine, this required tremendous concentration not unlike the concentration required to write a poem. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. In the hush of the poetry section all that could be heard was the sound of a woman walking across the wooden floor in boots that are fashionable to the time and make a sound like a small gun going off.

At the end of the poem,  he jumped off the page neatly, making barely a sound, closed the book and placed it back down on the floor where he'd found it.

There, beneath Brenda Hillman, were books by Pessoa, Ron Padgett, Montale, and Noelle Kocot, a poet from Brooklyn he'd seen reading on YouTube.

Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2005).