Reading Reports, haibun and Seattle Adventures

A few little reading report details and Seattle adventures. Needless to say I am drowning in new books!

I was so happy to get my copy of American Poet (The Journal of The Academy of American Poets) Spring 2011, which contains a wonderful article by Aimee Nezhukumatathil on haibun, featuring some sample haibun…including Basho’s from The Narrow Road to the Interior, Aimee’s “When Mountains Fang the Sky,” Kimiko Hahn’s “Untitled,” Lee Ann Roripaugh’s “Inquiline” and my haibun, “The Fox-Wife Describes Their Courtship” from She Returns to the Floating World. A great article if you teach haibun! Thanks Aimee! I feel honored to be in such great company.

So a few notes from my four days of whirlwind readings:

C. Dale Young’s poetry reading was funny, dark, moving…Torn is a completely great book. My husband says it was some of the best poetry he’s heard at Open Books. I also got to see Tacoma poet Jeff Walt and Rick Barot, who says he is working on both another book of poems AND a book of prose, so yay for that!

Rae Armantrout read some from Money Shot, and I clocked references to True Blood, Buffy, the financial scandals, Little Red Riding Hood, pornography, and that was just in the first couple of poems! Her poems are full of little inside jokes and references to pop culture, which can seem difficult, but when she reads them, just seem like the natural progression of her thoughts. Glenn also got to catch up with Rae’s very sweet husband (another supportive poetry husband – got to love those guys)

Maya Zellar’s new book, Rust Fish, (http://www.amazon.com/Rust-Fish-Maya-Jewell-Zeller/dp/0984451099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305555769&sr=1-1)captures a girl’s coming-of-age in the Pacific Northwest. One of my favorite poems from the book involves an argument about using Round-Up.

I also got ahold of a few other books, Jeremy Halinen’s What Other Choice (who, among other things, reconstructs the story of the garden of Eden in interesting ways) and a totally charming chapbook about travelling through Japan by Matthew Thorburn called Disappears in the Rain. I also got Eaven Boland’s A Journey of Two Maps, which has a whole essay about the underworld and the character of Nausicaa, so I had to buy it.

In the few spare minutes in between going to poetry readings, we managed to visit Golden Gardens park, going to the beach and pier and seeing the beautiful snowy mountains against the ocean, Pike Place Market (acquiring some giant pink tulips) and my favorite Seattle art gallery Roq La Rue, that was doing an exhibition of tiny sculpted cities and another of Victorian daguerreotype of family members posing with, say, yetis or a giant squid. That was mostly during our four hours of sunshine on Saturday. It’s been a cold and nasty spring, as I think I’ve mentioned, so when the sun shines at all, all of Seattle goes crazy to get out in it. Oh, and a quick fundraiser during Capital Hill’s Art Walk for the Japanese earthquake disaster, at which I got a crazy cute art toy designed by Yumiko Kayukawa and two of her posters.