After an outpouring of kindness to me during the last few days, I am grateful for so many thoughtful and encouraging friends and acquaintances and yesterday I got even notes in the mail and a kitty-grieving care package containing chocolates and kitty socks and a very touching pencil portrait of my cat by my friend’s daughter. Thanks everyone, your well-wishes have really helped.
It also helped to be really busy this weekend with poetry-related and non-poetry related stuff – In Posse Review – who recently published an issue with some great Seattle poets – including friends like Peter Pereira 😉 – had a party at this cool coffee-and-wine bar place – I didn’t have any poetry in there but I showed up because I interviewed poet Brian Turner (of Here, Bullet) for the issue. It was nice to chat with a bunch of local poets and hang out and socialize – nothing like a party to take your mind off what’s bothering you – and afterwards, we visited the nearby Scarecrow Video – a place famous for its huge selection of movies of all kinds – and found not only rare Miyazaki videos and DVDs but a whole wall labeled POETRY – with video tapes and DVDs of things like readings and interviews by Merwin and Gluck and Jorie Graham and videos about poetry, slam poetry readings, who knew these things existed? I checked out the Gluck and Lucille Clifton videos and also Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, which was definitely more child-oriented even than Spirited Away. Then today I met with a few other poet friends for enjoyable poetry chat and then visited the Animé Store in Bellevue, where I bought nothing but admired the idea of a store devoted to anime – it even has themed snacks, which I was too chicken to try. Yesterday I got word of the first proof copy of my book – which had some things wrong on the cover – so I also had that to stress about, a good distraction from dead-cat thoughts.