Spent most of the afternoon at the Carrboro International Poetry Festival hearing about 10 of the 40 poets scheduled to read there. Organizer Patrick Herron and I will both be reading tomorrow. I had to leave just after Tonya Olson’s wonderful set which included a piece in which Joyce’s The Dead is rewritten to be about the breakup of an affair between the author and Lisa Marie Presley over the author’s refusal to become a Scientologist. I cannot explain any further except to say I recommend this piece be it poem or short story or performance piece.
Later Sally and I went to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP banquet. There among the entertainers was a terrific a capella group called “the Sons of Bethel.” The Sons have been part of the Music on the Terrace program at UNC’s Johnston Center in the past year or so. Tonight they were playing to a home crowd.