Best Canadian Poetry

I went.

I went to the celebration of the Best Canadian Poetry 2008. I stood in the back behind the coat rack. I didn’t want to go over and stand beside the bar because it looked too low. Gauging the height of the people leaning against it I determined they were all incredibly short. Another voice in my head was telling me there’s no way the bar and all the people standing at it could be that short. That standing by the bar would not equal me - in an attempt to lean against it - slumping heavily forward, my shoulders and back forming a negative attention drawing exaggerated question mark. It was telling me; here I was going at it again, with my literal delusions of grandeur. And I was listening to it. I was considering the possibility of it. But I still preferred it where I was despite the conceivable refutability of my own logic.

Eventually poets were reading and more people were coming in and it almost looked normal, I was thinking, me standing – not exactly behind – but behind and beside the coat rack. Anyway, I could see everything perfectly well. I could hear it too.

Before that though, before the comfort of feeling it was possible I was blending in, the publisher, Halli Villegas sent a very warm smile in my direction. When she was smiling at me I wasn’t sure who she was but then what she was wearing - a gorgeous red suit jacket and skirt - plus where she was situated – hovering over the books on sale- plus my remembering a picture of her I saw visiting her company’s - Tightrope Books - blog all came together like specially encrypted electronic surveillance data in a Mission Impossible movie. But I didn’t smile back because of all that. I smiled back because what her smile was saying to me was that even though she could see the awkwardness of how I was feeling she could also tell I was secretly like a cat who doesn’t mind, when necessary, holding the position of uncomfortable social dynamics even if I didn’t know it yet myself.