Way too much rain in JUNEuary
For a week we’ve had rainy cold weather–very wrong for the season. Today, at eleven a.m. it grew dark so suddenly, we thought someone turned out the lights.
Rain rushed in, and we grumbled about having to light yet another fire in the woodstove.
Last night I heard Kay read at Book Passage– I got Connie Breeze to come, as well as another longtime friend, the drummer Sally Burr. I saw many of Kay’s devoted readers, colleagues, and friends in the packed bookshop. Three different women introduced Kay, reminding me of a team lead-out in a road race: the domestiques give it their all, and then the champion sprints in for the win.
Anyone who’s heard Kay before knows that, while her poetry stands beautifully on the page, her readings are wonderful.
She mentioned how she’d always wanted to be a stand-up comic, but that she probably would have bombed on the comedy circuit.
“Here, you are expecting a poet. The standard is so much lower….” (uproarious laughter from an adoring crowd).
“It’s amazing what people read into your work. This next one is called “Crown”:
A young woman wrote me, saying that she’d recently had some dental work, and recognized that this was what the poem was about …I told her no, that wasn’t it, but thanks for the laugh…”
I can’t sleep.
You know it’s strange when LA is colder than London. I hope the summer this year is warmer than last year in the Bay Area. Myself, I’m in France to ride the Alpine cols on my bucket list. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the warm weather they’ve been having here in France continues. I’ll need all the warm I can get on the Galibier! I like the haircut! I cut my own, too. À bientôt mon amie!
Looking good! Glad to see your wounds are looking much better too.
Best investment I’ve ever made was an electric hair trimmer, it’s saved me thousands of dollars over the years.
Poetry is a spoken form as far as I’m concerned. Even when reading it on the page it’s better to do so out loud. Poetry is about words and how the sound as much as it’s about what is meant by those words. When you read it silently it’s too likely you’ll miss words, thats how most folk read, their eyes just skip over and assume the little words between the nouns and verbs. That does a great disservice to the author, someone who might have spent an age finding just the right words and another age finding just the right order.
yeap raining in Reno as well, thank goodness for fenders
…being the local transplanted canadian / long time marinite & an admirer of eloquent words & our graceful surrounding greenery, i have to comment on kay’s wonderfully crafted “crown”…(which happens to be the meaning of my given name)…
…a simple yet stunningly beautiful emotional image…the words could work for other places but it’s birth was here, in dear to the heart, lovely marin…
…this ex-pat of the “great white north”, does & will forever lovingly speak of marin as where the palm trees meet the pines…
…hey, kiddo…glad ya lost the raccoon eyes…
i keep reading that poem again and again, i am not much of a poem person but that one really speaks to me and to this year. maybe the rain has finally stopped.