hello. my name is ned &
i will be your facilitator
thank you for coming. we
are grateful for the distance
you have traveled & the thinking
you have brought
to this meeting. the restrooms
are to the right for men & to
the left for women
our topic today certainly
reverberates but before i say
that let me say we will be talking
in the following manner: i will talk
some of you will talk, i will record
facilitate & manipulate your
conclusions to my needs
which, i’m glad to say, are yours
but first, please introduce yourselves
to everyone by giving your name
affiliation, & the single, most salient
feature of your being. thank you
please keep all your remarks
brief. i will be very strict
about this. we have very little time
so don’t repeat anything you’ve
heard or read. & now, let’s hear
from you. but first i see
that my director is here
thank you ned. i’m grateful
for the distance you have come
we here value your values &
experiences. i won’t take much
of your time because you don’t have
much but i do want you to kmow
how much we value your thoughts
& the distance you have come
thank you. ned? thank you director
& now we’re going to hear from
you. but first i want to prioritize
our conceptualizations during our
group face mail so we can
recontextualize them & calendarize
our interactive, proactive actualizations
on an ongoing basis, thereby repurposing
out core redundancies. but first
i see lunch is here
A.B. Spellman is the author of two books of poems, Things I Must Have Known (Coffee House Press, 2008) and The Beautiful Days (The Poet's Press, 1965), and the nonfiction book Four Lives in the Bebop Business (Pantheon Books, 1966), later republished as Four Jazz Lives. He worked at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1975 to 2005. By the time he retired, he was Deputy Director of Programs, and the agency named one of its Jazz Masters awards in his honor. He has served on panels for the Rockefeller Foundation and ASCAP, and is on the Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Institution's African-American Museum. To read more by this author: A.B. Spellman: First Books