Spring Reading

Dearest Bigfan Blog Readers,
Please visit www.Leafpress.ca to read a new poem by yours truly. It's being featured as the "Monday Poem" for this week (4/25/05) and will be in their "Monday's Archive" after that.
I am currently reading School of Art by Mark Doty. Before that I enjoyed Wedding Day by Dana Levin, who is a local to Santa Fe. I am waiting with great anticipation for the release of the paperback of the new Czeslaw Milosz, Second Space, translated by Robert Haas and due out in Sept. I'm also waiting for James Tate's newest to come to paperback (so I can maybe afford it) Return to the City of White Donkeys--what a great title!
A week or so ago, I got to see Campbell McGrath read at the Lannan reading series. His newest book is called Pax Atomica. His stuff is quite witty and heavily laden with popular culture references. He's doing a self & society type thing that I think he believes will help bring the masses back to poetry.
Anyway, on a less evolved reading level, I am also currently enjoying the last in the Philip Pulman series, His Dark Materials: The Amber Spyglass. I really don't think these books were written for children.
Well, I'm off to frolic in a rainy Sunday afternoon!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Julia here. Ah, National Poetry Month. Suddenly poetry is inescapable, it seems to seep from everywhere. Last weekend caught the last day (practically the last hour, actually) of the POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004 exhibit at the California Historical Society, which featured art by poets, poems by artists, collaborations between poets and artists, etc. Features included Norma Cole's fabric-sketchbook installation and hand-drawn poems by Bob Grenier and other works too numerous to mention here as I trip toward sleep. I love that the quiet little gallery is tucked away on Mission Street not two doors down from my very first office building from my very first days in San Francisco, when I worked for a quiet little women's history research group. I loved working in the Financial District - my well-paid lawyer friend would treat me to bagels and smoothies for lunch and the SF MOMA is free once a month and the incomparable Alexander Books was just two blocks away. What have I been reading lately? "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Immediate and wonderful. The other big news, of course, is wholly self-interested: come fall, I will be a student again ("but was I ever not?") in Philadelphia, city of my grandmother's birth but a new city to me. I'll look for her there, I'll study poetics and critical theory and write smart things, and our little press will truly become TRI-COASTAL (east, west and Mississippi, kids). Alright, time for sleep. More to come.