Last Monday, at the beginning of the Christmas week, when it was almost as dark and cold and lonely as possible, I drove to Berkeley in the worst imaginable traffic to participate in a poetry reading. Of all things. My back hurt afterwards, but I’m so glad I went.The venue was the inspired, glamorous, intimate Berkeley City Club, famously designed by California architect Julia Morgan.

Bay Area Generations is “an intergenerational literary series featuring readers of different generations performing their work in tandem.” Poets submit in pairs, and accepted poems are curated into a single evening-long reading, with musical interludes, but without commentary or banter by the poets. It’s a remarkably freeing enterprise.

The whole evening was wonderful, and I hope you can take the time to listen to the entire video. But if you want to jump to the section where I was reading, paired…