It's Seafair weekend and the neighborhood is mobbed with people coming to watch the hydroplane race and the Blue Angels airshow and such. What a noisy waste of fuel. I usually try to find a way to leave the neighborhood for the duration.

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I've been working more on the Expedition poems. I have not written anything like this before, and so hunted around for other poem series that I could find, to get an idea of how others have approached doing this. I looked again at Ellen Bryant Voight's Kyrie, about the 1914 Flu Epidemic. I also found a couple recent books that had some interesting poem series: Erica Funkhouser's Earthly, which has a 15-part poem about Johnny Appleseed and the bringing of apples to America. One of the poems is a list of names of different apple types, and makes a very interesting found poem. Another book is Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables, which has three long series in it: "Berthe Morisot: Retrospective" which is about the painter's life and art, told through a series of "Colorplates;" "The Kudzu Chronicles" about the invasion of kudzu in the US South; and "Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle" that is a tribute of sorts to the work and life of Berryman. And then, of course, there is Rebecca Loudon's Navigate, a series in the voice of Amelia Earhart. I'll have to look at that again, too.

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