Right about then, Matt seemed to start wondering just who I was. “I guess like that,” he said. “Though she’s not really a rock-star poet. More of a cult favorite. She doesn’t give a lot of readings nowadays. So this is a big deal.”

“I didn’t know there were any rock-star poets.”

“The ones everybody knows.”

“Define ‘everybody.’”

“Poets like Gary Snyder. Jorie Graham.” He was counting them off on his fingers. “And Merwin, Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, but they all kind of just died. Um, Nikki Giovanni. Kevin Young. For starters. Everybody has their own list.”

“Huh. Are there some rock stars who are poets? Like, Stevie Nicks.”

He was getting a little exasperated with me. “They’re two entirely different things.”

The auditorium was filling up now, getting noisy, and that was an excuse to stop talking. More people were here than I’d expected, over a hundred, I guessed. There was still no sign of Oscar, but I thought I saw a couple of the hens down front, gabbing with each other. The stage was still empty except for a podium and a microphone.

Now, I have to stop here and admit, I wasn’t as much of a poetry rube as I made myself sound to Matt. I might not have known his Billboard Top Ten Poets, but different teachers had rubbed my nose in enough poems that I’d retained a few things. I’d learned that a poem must not mean but be, that it should be dumb and mute, which would have been a good trick. The teachers had tried, but there was an inevitable, eat-your-broccoli vibe to the whole thing, plus my goofy brain made the words on the page squirm and refuse to mean anything. Every so often the sound of a poem caught and held me, like when the highwayman came riding, riding, the highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door. Although this was said to be an old-fashioned sort of poem, and I was not supposed to like it too much.

I leaned forward to get Matt’s attention. “Hey, I was kidding. Stevie Nicks writes songs, not poems.”

“Yeah?” He brightened up. “Well, if Viridian wrote songs, she’d probably be like Stevie Nicks.”

One of the doors in back opened and there was a stir among the crowd. I turned around in my seat to see Viridian appear, accompanied by a nervous-looking man whom I guessed to be in charge. The two of them made their way down the aisle to the stage.

How much does a poem depend on who wrote it? How can we know the dancer from the dance? Poets die, and even their outline, their ghost, disappears. Who was Shakespeare anyway? Or Homer? It didn’t really seem to matter.