Back from The Palouse

Kathleen and I had a great time in Spokane. The flight over was gorgeous. It was a clear sunny day, and we were in in one of those twin-prop Horizon Air planes, that only gets a few thousand feet up in the air, barely clearing the mountains it seems, but giving you these incredible closeup views of the landscape. To go from city, to forest, to mountains covered in snow, to farmland, lakes, rivers with dams, the Palouse, it was just breathtaking.

The reading at Aunties had a small but enthusiastic audience. We met a group from Rock & Sling beforehand at The Catacombs for dinner, and a group from the EWU MFA program afterwards for drinks. It was so warm we sat outside in the late-night summer-like air. Very nice.

The next morning, I went for a walk in Spokane's Riverfront Park. I hadn't been there since the 1970's. I had forgotten there is a river with a huge frigging waterfall in the center of the city! It was stunning.

On our flight back Kathleen and I took turns reading in Elaine Equi's Ripple Effect and Dean Young's embryoyo. Hands down the Equi is the better book (though it's not quite fair to compare, as hers is a selected, and his is a single volume). Her poems are just so much more dense and precise and concise and intelligent and free of cliche & idle chit-chat. His poems tend to be all the same long single-stanza narrative, about a page to a page-and-a-half long, full of prosy chit-chat and non sequiturs and such. There are great individual lines in embryoyo, but rarely one solid poem top-to-bottom.

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Waiting for Dean to get home from work. We're going to have some spicy sushi rolls and a pear ginger martini for our appetizer. Then I am baking salmon, to serve with some veggies and cous cous. Yum! And, if it stays warm enough out, we may eat outside.