Blue Hair
That night I read “Blue Hair,” an anecdote, taken from something I had read recently in the Boston Globe about the woman whose long straight hair was used to make the crosshairs in the famous Norden bombsights. I hadn’t known that they used real hair as crosshairs. Bill Knott read after me. I had been the warm-up act for him in his hometown. This was the first time I had given a reading in Cambridge. The large crowd in Adams House was focused on Bill Knott, of course. He read very short poems very quickly that were very funny and threw the pages on the ground after he read from them. The poems went off like hand grenades, one after the other. I watched Marie Howe and Mary Karr, who were sitting in the front row, burst into laughter after each one of his poems landed.