the north wind steals my hat
I have returned from Britain. I like travel, but I like coming home. I really can’t overstate the hospitality shown by pretty much everyone who handled my event-packed visit there, most of all Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press and PN Review. (If you’re not a subscriber to PN Review, do consider it.)
I have also reread The Sea and the Mirror (though not in the Arthur Kirsch edition, alas) a couple of times by way of preparing to teach it.
Were those birds I saw in Kelvingrove Park actually magpies? I’m not sure. (The proportions and tones are right, and I was told that there are a lot more magpies in Britain than there were ten years ago! but the double stripe on the wing makes them look unlike the pictures I’ve seen.) I may look here.
If you have no conflicting plans for tonight you should consider hearing Chase Twichell and Kathy Fagan read at the Blacksmith House, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, at 8pm.
If you have no conflicting plans for Wednesday night you might consider attending this roundtable discussion aboutr recent poetry with Maureen McLane, Adam Kirsch, Rob Casper, and me. I now know where and when it will take place: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, on Harvard’s campus, at 7pm.
Finally, I have discovered (or perhaps remembered) that Allan Peterson, one of my favorite new-ish poets and maybe the smartest underrated poet in America, has a calm, black-and-white website, promoting both his visual art (about which I don’t know a whole lot) and his poems. Here are some of his poems.
Heather Roche wrote:
Dear Stephen,
This is possibly going to read as …well… creepy. Many apologies if it does.
I was just a bit curious as to whether or not the power of the internet (cue dramatic music) would lead me to discovering a web presence for a poet that I met on a train between Huddersfield and Leeds about a week and a half ago. And to my great surprise, it worked!
I’m not sure if you’d even remember, and I wasn’t even going to write to tell you of my success… but I thought, why not?!
You write beautifully. I hope you had a lovely tour in the UK!
Best wishes,
Heather (the musician with the long-haired friend and giant tube of an instrument)
Posted on 06-Apr-09 at 12:26 pm | Permalink
admin wrote:
No, it’s not creepy, and thanks! Now I shall have to look for your work as well! and someday I’ll see Huddersfield, And Leeds (important to rock music too as you may know). I hope your journey went equally well. I gave a poetry reading in Hull: sparsely attended, to be sure, but my host was great (the Irish poet David Wheatley) and two people bought my books!
Posted on 06-Apr-09 at 7:52 pm | Permalink