But while at the Art Institute there was a teacher of my art historian Bill Burkson and

Burkson was a very well-known poet and he told me one night to go to this poetry reading and I was like poetry I'm not even

interested in poetry why would I want to go to poetry? He's like I just out at the

Cal Theater it's not far from here if you're not doing anything come check it out

so I didn't have anything going on so I went to this poetry meeting and it turns out it's the release party for the Norton anthology of postmodern American poetry and I go to this thing. It's at the Cal Theater in San Francisco and Diane

de Prima is there and Ron Padgett and just a host of all these amazing

American icons and poetry and I am just floored. There's

visual poetry, there's poetry as song, there's all that this whole world of

possibility and language

unfolds before my eyes and my ears and my whole body and I just I freaked that was it

Because Paul Hoover introduces the whole night by sharing this line from

Jack Spicer who was a great Berkeley Renaissance poet from the 1950s and Spicer is in the anthology long

dead at this point that Paul Hoover shares this line which is the poet builds a castle on the moon made of

dead skin and glass. The poet builds a castle on the moon made of dead skin and glass and I was like what that's the

craziest weirdest most beautiful thing I've ever heard I want I want to do that I want to have that kind of strange imaginative power.

And I wasn't accessing that with photography. And so that was it, that night, that was my night of, you know, the night of the lightning bolt.

And I just wanted to write poems.

I wanted to get into this poetry thing. I'm Sreeney Rao and this is the unmistakable creative podcast where you get a window

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