A riveting reading Saturday at Segue by Norma Cole, who looked somehow more French than ever in her mod haircut and olive-green trousers. Also more delicate and stronger than ever.

The final piece she read was a tour de force: a catalog of words and phrases she has found it most challenging to articulate since her stroke, which left her, for a while, speechless. So… poem literally as therapy, rehabilitation, challenge, bullfight almost, and struggle to articulate — useful, necessary, performative, and demanding total attentiveness. That feeling of watching someone fight to “come back” out of a twilight space. Or watching someone learn (I was reminded, at moments, of my job). Certain particularly hard-to-say words she flubbed, then wrestled with until, “there, she said it” — a feeling of concern and wonderment and vicarious triumph on the part of this listener. Right there with her uneasy rhythms, her upright tenacious form.

I was about to write that I don’t remember the last time I was so moved by a reading until I remembered how palpable was the yearning in the reading Alan Davies gave just last month.

Oh! These humans! These human poets! How bravely they write through life.

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