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.