It was a great pleasure to finally meet Nick, who was warm and engaging and gamely accompanied us to an early Ethiopian dinner even though he didn't eat much. Hearing Nick read was illuminating--I tended to play for laughs, but Nick was serious and intense, reading intently from his postcards (well, we were all kind of hunched over our texts since it was nearly pitch black at our end of the room), but then occasionally pausing and looking up, as if what we were hearing was not words on a page but a thought or meditation in the process of emerging--which perhaps epitomizes the mode of the postcard poem.