A Lot of Everything

Poetry--
I wish I had some interesting poetry things to share. Let's see. A friend bought me Barbara Hamby's book "Babel," which I've started reading and loving. What a poet, she is. You can get lost--in the very best way--inside her poems. They are so thick with living in Paris, with black-jacketed girls. Every line is treat for the reader.

Oh, here's something. I was at the Poetry on Wheels, bus poem anthology reading on Sunday in Seattle. The room was full and great poets. Madeline DeFrees read as did Joan Swift. My friend, Martha Silano read, as did friends Ronda Broatch, Ann Hursey, Paula Gardiner. Oh, there were more, more, more.

I purchased Nancy Pagh's new book, No Sweeter Fat. I highly recommend this book. In the beginning of the book are a series of "fat lady" poems which are both funny and poignant.

Here's part of one from "Fat Lady Reads"

A fat lady reads a book
she reads a book all day
and all day
she is not a fat lady

unless she reads a diet book
or Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone
and there's a good chance she reads
one of those.

A fat lady reads a book
and enters a world
where there really are no fat people
of consequence

except old Mrs. Manson Mingott
in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence
whose "immense accretion of flesh
descended on her in middle life
like a flood of lava on a doomed city"

. . .

Truly, she is a poet to watch. I can't believe this is her first book--incredible.



Happy Feet--
I saw Happy Feet yesterday and well, I loved it. Maybe it's too easy, how can you not like a dancing penguin? But really, I liked that it was Footloose meets An Inconvenient Truth for children.

Not your parent's Christmas music--
Best streaming Christmas songs-- The Mountain KMTT FM Seattle