Check out Aimee's super scary flight home.
***
I was flying into St. Louis Valentine's Day weekend a couple of years ago. The jet had stopped over in Memphis, picking up passengers, letting others off.
We were just beginning to accelerate down the runway when everyone heard a loud boom. No, a loud BOOM.
The jet immediately stopped. The pilot came over the intercom, saying that they may have just had a flight tire. We were all skeptical. Even the pilot seemed like he didn't buy it.
The woman sitting beside me called her husband, a pilot, and described the noise. He knew right away what the problem was. After a few minutes, the pilot announced we were going to be switching planes, that although no tire was flat and none of their gauges indicated any problems they were going to play it safe.
I was thinking he probably shouldn't announce that none of their safety equipment was troubled by a large explosion just before takeoff.
It turned out some kind of compressor in the engine detonated as the engine revved up, sparing us the horrific experience Aimee and her husband had.
***
This picture makes me sick(er) about missing AWP. It's weird how many different parts of my life are intersecting here: presumably, Laurel is taking it, Laurel who I went to undergrad with and was in all our poetry workshops; and in it is Megan, the wife of my pal Ander Monson from the bad old Alabama days, who also served with me some hard time in the English dept.'s writing center; Ali Stine, whose work Ander first noticed in his days as Black Warrior Review editor, and would later work with Ander up in Michigan, and was introduced to me by Ander; and then Emma Ramey, another Tuscaloosa survivor.
***
Next week: reading at Virginia Tech.
Tomorrow: my birthday.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
7 comments:
Virginia tech!!
That's within driving distance! I'll check the schedule and see what is going on-
If i can't get there, look up Kamau Rucker- he's in the MFA program and editor of the Poetry Society of Virginia newsletter- he's quite a poet!
That'd be cool if you could make it, Shann. It's me and Eliot Wilson, another Slate poet.
I'll put my ear to the ground-
I'll have to find a driving companion- this old lady-one-eyed-poet doesn't drive too well at night anymore-
I will alert the Poetry Society of Virginia folks out there to go.
Correct on all counts. You would have been most welcome at the gathering on the roof! Next year in Atlanta...
Yes, we missed you! Ander and Megan and Emma and Laurel are wonderful and well, in case you were wondering. I looked for you, even though I knew you weren't there. Still I looked. I do that.
i missed seeing you (and Bob!) at AWP, but a little birdie is delivering a belated present in the mail later this week~~
Laurel, Aimee, Ali, now that's a murderer's row of poetry babehood. I could hardly stand it...,.
Next year I'll be there.
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