Had a nice lunch at Julia's yesterday with Rick Barot, who has been teaching at PLU in Tacoma. Such a sweet guy. (Despite having trained at the Iowa "death star" of poetry. ~grin~) I'd been shopping at Open Books beforehand, and had a stack of new books, including Martha Collin's amazing Blue Front, a sort of cross-genre poetry/non-fiction book exploring the events and history and people involved in one of the last public lynchings. Difficult material. Wonderful writing.

Then hosted poetry group at my house last night with Kathryn, Jeff, T, Ted, Susan. Good poems all around. Great fun and silliness and laughter and perhaps a little too much wine.

I work a half day today, and then have poetry lunch with Kathleen at Elysium. Wheeee!

*

from today's Word a Day:

tarantism (TAR-uhn-tiz-uhm) noun

An uncontrollable urge to dance.

[After Taranto, a town in southern Italy where this phenomenon was experienced
during the 15-17th centuries. It's not clear whether tarantism was the symptom
of a spider's bite or its cure, or it may have been just a pretext to dodge a
prohibition against dancing. The names of the dance tarantella and the spider
tarantula are both derived from the same place.]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=tarantism