Janine Pommy Vega and Jack Micheline: March 24, 1976

Janine Pommy Vega apologizes for her health, then begins with new poems, "so I still have some excitement about them." She reads: "Insurgent View of the Poet's Gown," "Stargazer" (which she notes is for John Estaugh, who has recently translated Rumi), "The Traveler" (written for Susan and Martin Carey, the latter a painter), "The Expected One," "The Gypsy Players" (written "for a bunch of musicians I traveled with briefly"), "Roots Revisited" (a Thanksgiving poem written in Hoboken, New Jersey), "Song for My Sister" (for Lenore Kandel, "who read here last week"), "Primal man and his chorus of fire..."(after a recent total lunar eclipse), and "Winter."

From poems written living while living on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, from her book Morning Passage, she reads the title poem, "Morning Passage," "I set my heart on the road to find you, silent friend...," "Drought," "Sunset Under Clouds," "Deepening Twilight," "Jungle Vegetation," "Birthday Cake," and "Song of Departure." 

Jack Micheline reads what he calls "a cross-section of earlier works, street-works done in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Paris, Mexico City, all over...": "On Zion Hill," "Street of Lost Fools," a song he says "I wrote the other day...walking around Chinatown," which he sings, "Litany to a Lost Eagle On My Head," "Puerto Rican Mother," "The Rabbi," "Chicago Rooming House," "O Mary, Rose of Dublin," a song riffing on Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind," "It is Thursday morning...," "Ballad of Benny Rhodes," sings "Chicken in the Sea," a rap beginning "Poetry is a trip, when you get inside..." prefacing "Poem Written in the Rain on Third Avenue," "The wind blows against the trees...," "Poem to Nicanor Parra," "Pussy Willow," "Zero Is Nothing," reads "On Zion Hill" again by request, "Just Two Eyes Like Poems," and closes with a song "written at 30,000 feet...the first one I wrote" with its refrain "It's the dead that rule this world." 

Following their readings, Janine Pommy Vega and Jack Micheline respond to questions from their audience, regarding the presence of women writing poetry and the message they're bringing across. Mark Linenthal asks of the poet as "being isolated," then asks again about "heightening your sense of isolation," to which Pommy Vega responds that she need "solitude as a basic principal, but I also can't stew there...or I get crazy" and Micheline says "he picks his subjects" from among  and identifies with those who are cast out by society, that "you have to know what happened" to Whitman and other poets in US-American society. A woman in the audience emphasizes connections between people — Micheline talks about his working with children in the Poets in the Schools program, and Pommy Vega reads a poem written by a boy of twelve named Rafael Guzman.