Imagine yourself at 27, rue de Fleurus, Paris, 6th Arrondissement, 2009; you are in the atelier of a French painter who occupies the space where Gertrude Stein lived from 1903 to 1938 and entertained such people as Picasso and Hemingway. The painter is carrying on the tradition of the atelier's former occupant. A young American poet walks into the crowded room, displaying a feather he found recently and a poem he wrote with it, using ink from the 19th Century.
