At dinner before the reading we were waiting for the food when someone suggested that we should actually talk about what poems we were going to read. A flurry of activity: Cassie's newly minted books flying everywhere, eyes frantically scanning pages, looking for the right poem, people finding their partners and saying "Do you think this one goes with this one?" And since at least two pairings (me & Del, Nick & Stephanie) hadn't had time to be published yet we had to haul out the raw materials themselves--I pulled a month's worth of Del postcards out of my bag (which, along with Cassie's suitcase, made me think of Ginsberg's "Mugging" and his "shoulder bag with 10, 000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor") and handed them over, Del doing the same, so we could hunt through and find the right ones. When the food did finally come no one even looked at it.