Razovskyville #1

So last week I decided to join those who are livestreaming readings, rants, and concerts during this era of COVID 19. I decided I would offer up a live video on Facebook. Like a lot of other people, I am reaching far back into my life during this pandemic. I'm listening to the music that blew me away when I was in my late teens (Blondie, Talking Heads, the Slits, early Brian Eno, the Jam…), and I'm going back to some of the writers who excited me in that era.

So I figured it would be kind of fun to read my first published poems, the dozen that appeared in The Thing in Exile, published in 1975 by Books by Kids, when I was 16. I wrote most of those poems the previous year, and they appeared alongside about a dozen poems each by my childhood friends Steve Feldman and Mark Laba. I hadn't read most of those poems in…over 40 years. Goddamn, I'm a geezer!

I was pretty anxious about this livestream, partly because I am so technologically challenged, but it ended up going really well. Here's the video, minus the comments that were flowing by on the side of the screen. Apparently I had 46 or so viewers at one point, which is more than I would typically expect at a reading.

I decided afterwards that, for a while at least, I'll be doing a livestream on my Facebook every Thursday at 7:15 p.m. EDT. And I retroactively called the "show" Razovskyville. Here is the episode from May 14.

Over and out.