I spoke with Katie Degentesh right before her reading (poor thing, she was trying to eat her dinner) and asked her what she thought about the fact that some of our favorite blogger friends, like David Hess and Stephanie Young are getting won right over to New York due to her popular Bloggedy Blog Blog. Katie talked about the skills you need to survive a walk down a New York City street. I said I thought her blog captured the gritty moments that can't be so easily supplied by one's imagination based on previous visits here. One could easily summon up memories of the St Mark's Bookstore or the Poetry Project, but Katie's terrific tableaux supply some of that unique flavor of those passing conversations that seemingly could only happen here. Katie read from her blog some and read some poems that astonished me for their insight into how words as objects stand in for meaning more than we ever think they could. In one piece she rings so many changes on the word "popsicle" I could only compare hearing this (Drew Gardner would appreciate this) to a complex solo by, say, John Coltrane, in his unforgettable rendition of "Aisha." Douglas Rothschild recalled one of Katie's readings at the Zinc bar when she arrived in an all silver outfit that well befitted her poems which he described as "shining." This was pretty good considering the fact that Douglas-in between sneezes- left his intro to her reading on the Staten Island Ferry. Will it wash up on the shores of the Upper West Side like a message in a bottle, like he said? You never know...