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| Posing in the Bradbury |
We don't want to mention the winter. It was fairly endless. Quite a bit of snow and very cold. So what to do, we of course set out for California again, this time to the South only. Very nostalgic sleeping in Kirk and Melinda's house for the first and last time before it would be sold. Melinda joined us for the day when we visited the Wells Tile shop in Echo Park. Then Kirk joined us as we toured the Fine Arts Building and the Biltmore Hotel. Bill and I took a tour of the Tournament of Roses Wrigley home, and then we had a fine day at the races with Mimi. Roger, Fran, Gil and Joan joined us for an outing to the Bradbury Building and the Los Angeles Public Library. A last visit with Kirk and Melinda at Buster's, then we set off for Laguna Beach. Lunch with my cousins was a success, a long time since I had seen Terry, Katie and Sandy. Several more inches of snow awaited us when we arrived back in New Jersey.
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| Chaffinch Island, Guilford |
Bill and I enjoyed auditing a class on the brain at Princeton, and I took a class about how art has been used in American history to "frame culture." A nice surprise was the appearance of one of my poems in the local glossy
Princeton Magazine--as one of five featured poets we will be reading at the D & R Greenway in July. In May I attended a conference, "Poetry by the Sea," where I was part of a panel on "Poetry and Transportation" with Dolores Hayden and Patricia Valdata. My talk was entitled "Motion as Commotion in the Soul." I also participated in a seminar on ekphrastic poetry, and did a short presentation on Robert Hass' poem "Art and Life." The best part of the conference was its location in Madison, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. Inspired by one of my fellow attendees (a Brit) I actually swam two of the days there, in water supposedly hovering around 54-degrees.
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| View of the cemetery from the Atheneum |
In early June Bill and I flew to Boston for the Boston Early Music Festival. From Burning River Baroque at Emmanuel Church to Four and Twenty Lutes on the last day we enjoyed some great music. We went with Harry to the Nichols House Museum in Beacon Hill, then to a concert featuring Shira Kammen and women singers performing Hildegarde Bingen's chants woven into the work of a modern woman composer. Then that evening the three of us heard Monteverdi's opera "Ritorno di Ulisse," a fantastic production. We also heard a lecture on Handel, and another at the Atheneum on John Singer Sargent. Chris and Nancy joined us for dinner at a Puerto Rican restaurant. Now we just prepare for the rest of the summer, to Chester, to Gilmanton.
