In actual poetry-related news…
Got a chance to sneak into downtown San Diego (for the first time since we moved here) to go to City College’s San Diego book festival. Li Young Lee was there, though I didn’t see him read, and I got to catch up briefly with Ilya Kaminsky, a terrific poet who now works as a professor at SDSU instead of as a lawyer. I met Lorna Dee Cervantes, from the blog world, which was pretty neat (I have a couple of her books on my shelf.) And I got to hear Carolyn Forche read. She’s a pretty accomplished reader. She read, to my delight, a lot of her older poems, including “The Colonel” and some new poems, including two about Ilya! I guess it’s not just my former workshop group on Bainbridge Island that he charmed…Carolyn Forche too! LOL. She talked about how her first teaching job was here in San Deigo (!!) and that she learned poetry from her mother’s college poetry textbook (me too!) So that was pretty cool. She looked great and was wearing patent strappy sandals. Glenn and I also made a side trip to a wonderful bakery in Hillcrest called Bread et Cie, which I recommend.
So, we have not yet gone to the zoo, any of the missions, Coronado…but we managed to drag our partially brain-dead selves to a poetry event! Who says our priorities are out of order?
PS Still many boxes downstairs. Also – a bunch of grading tomorrow. Grading gives me hives.
Thought I’d throw out a quick post in the middle of learning a byzantine grading system, similarly byzantine teaching software, unloading boxes, futilely trying to find the most ordinary household items…
Last night we went out and walked on the beach right at dusk. We saw three snowy egrets fly overhead, while the thin moon shone down through clouds. It’s been achingly hot here – who would have thunk southern Cali in October would be running in the high eighties every day? Meanwhile, I have no clothing for a warm climate, and I had to order a pair of reading glasses, because, ahem, at my 35 years, it turns out I, um, need bifocals, which I refuse to wear, so the reading glasses (which are regular reading glasses + my mighty astigmatic prescription, so of course they are expensive) are my concession. So I’ve had to put a kibbosh on reading anything closer than arms length, which leaves out books and magazines. Good thing I have all those student poems and discussions to grade! LOL.
Teaching online is a bit of a challenge for me, because it reveals that I rely on personal interaction more than I thought, especially in workshop. Workshops just flow much more smoothly in person where you can bounce ideas around more easily and just communicate much faster than you can online. Plus, I joke around a lot, which it turns out, you can’t do that much online. I have to learn a new set of skills to get points across kindly but firmly (every word is open to misinterpretation by sensitive souls!) And I still have to finish up that essay on Rachel Zucker and Beth Ann Fennelly which has become difficult because of the aforementioned trouble reading books. I can’t wait for my new glasses to get here.
Meanwhile, the American financial system is in collapse, the election is drawing near, leaving the new president to deal with a war and a 700 billion dollar bill for a very expensive bailout. Good luck with that, poor guy! I’m trying not to watch too much news, but I did sneak in some of the debate last night, gosh darn it! (That’s a little Palin humor there. She must have said “gosh darn” about sixteen times in the transcript I read.)
Anyway, not quite settled yet, but getting there, slowly…
