The
other evening I attended the book launch for the last book of poetry
published by Elise Partridge, who died earlier this year.
Elise,
with her husband Steve, was a friend of mine, and so I went, though I
hardly knew anyone there, and the ones I knew I didn't really know;
they were presences when I was in the English Department twenty years
before, so I more knew of them than knew them firsthand, so to speak.
Sometimes this was because they were profs whose courses I hadn't
taken; in fact, whether I'd taken their courses or not wouldn't
really matter because, well, I didn't socialize with the professors
when I was a grad student.
Then
there was the book launch itself, a series of readings of poems from
the book, some of them very interesting, but the most interesting
moment (not counting the moment when a street person tried to crash
the party and steal the donations money) – the most interesting
moment or reading for me was of an excerpt from something from the
Museum of Natural History about how only 10% of species are even
discovered before they become extinct. (I wonder how we know that,
but the point is, this resonated with me, along with my feeling of
knowing and not-knowing, and along with hearing Elise's poetry, so
that eventually I wrote a poem of my own, and here it is:
At
the Book Launch
Meeting people I used to not know
Hello, how are you, who are you again?
What are you up to now?
Not that I knew then.
In between
Where did it go?
90% of species exist without ever
being known
And then they're gone.
