Marilyn Chin (left) and Robert Pinsky take a twirl after their Two The Hard Way reading at the 2009 Calabash International Literary Festival on Sunday. - Photo by Mel Cooke

The Two The Hard Way format is a highly anticipated staple at the Calabash International Literary Festival, putting two outstanding writers together in one session. It does not pit them against each other, as the title often implies at the dancehalls and stage shows from which it is borrowed.

The Calabash audience has long been used to one Two The Hard Way session but got a double dose at the 2009 staging of the festival. Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz delivered the first on the opening night, while Marilyn Chin and Robert Pinsky served up the second at high noon on Sunday, the closing day.

Chin, the more effervescent of the pair in presentation, spoke to matters of love across the generation gap, the large audience giving a collective chuckle as she said "boy toys have love", closing with an engagement and "he is wearing my nipple ring".

She did a Chinese quatrain, one of her fusions of Eastern and Western poetry forms, stopping after the first couplet as the audience laughed. "You know what happens when you start a poem rhyming 'penis' and 'unhappiness'," she said. And the poem did prove to be about love the hard way in both senses, Chin saying "he married her for a green card/he abandoned her for a blonde".

'So You F John Donne' was a merry romp through literary promiscuity, all the writers she engaged with named 'John', and she closed with 'Free Endings', a story about a little girl who is being harassed by three boys with dogs, race being one of the possible causes ("one called her a wetback gook and she yelled back 'trailer trash mama'"). The story has three endings, Chin saying this was because she wanted to give the audience the power to choose.

In all the endings, Mai Ling reaches into the secret compartment in her backpack. In the first, she takes out one mini mooncake, eats it and is safe. In the second, she takes out three mini mooncakes, tossed them to the dogs and "finally, after months of fighting, they resolve their differences". In the third, which the audience definitely preferred, two mini mooncakes were actually "death stars dipped in poison". One got the dobermann, another got the pit bull, the third boy ran with his chihuahua, Mai Ling peed in the tomato patch and went home happily.

Target of emotions

Pinsky engaged the audience in a different way, his between poem reflections in measured tones leading them to the poetry along meandering paths at a deceptively leisurely pace. Pinsky spoke of the beauty of the setting, plus the beauty of variety and change Calabash represents, before reading from 'Jersey Rain', the poem speaking to substitution of the accustomed target of emotions ("when I had no enemy, I opposed my body").

His ABC poem contained words in alphabetical order, plus an equal sign between 'X' and 'Y', Pinsky starting, "Anybody can die eventually. Few go happily." And he ended "X equals your Zenos", recommending it is easy to learn after the audience's cheering had subsided.

Fascinating trip

A brief history of the saxophone (Pinsky said though a European invention, it is "a black American instrument, made so by genius") came before 'Ginza Samba'; 'Shirt' was a fascinating trip through history and a range of emotions through the garment.

And Pinsky spoke to the importance of the future and the past in an extensive introduction to 'At Pleasure Bay', based on a conversation between his father and someone who had played football against him in high school. This was after Pinsky and his father had revisited their old hometown and got lost, as all the familiar landmarks were gone.

The poem also connected historical events and people, fact and emotion, Pinsky closing "here is where you may have slipped across the water, when you were only a presence at Pleasure Bay."