AWAY - AND A LINK TO A LINK

This is just a drive-by posting as I'm away from home and the familiarity of computers/systems. While checking my email I discovered that Andy, who provides info for a website that is crammed with information about the Doukhabors, has linked to my blog posting about the Our Way Home Reunion. Neat! Check out Spirit Wrestlers.

Also heard from Ascent Aspirations. One of my poems, Trail Blazers Come to the Kootenays Again, will be in the next issue. Always good news. That's ANOTHER poem that began as a 3:15 Experiment in 2005.

I'm in Vancouver for another couple of days. Thanksgiving Dinner at an old friend's place this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll be taking in Body Worlds 3, the exhibition at Science World. It's the one with the plasticized bodies.

This has been a week of poetry and writing and thinking. Went to a Vancouver KSW reading by New York City resident Alan Davies on West Hastings Street. Took in a talk by Dr. Peter Hudoba who is into things spiritual and talked about how meditation can help us to reach (or at least attain occasional glimpses of) inner peace.

Began some new poems. Discussed work brought to the group, which was comprised of seven members of the George Bowering workshop from the Victoria School of Writing, summer of 2005.

Went to the Special Collections at Simon Fraser University's Library and saw a couple of gorgeous books done by Barbarian Press among others. One, from Shanty Bay Press called Circus: Five Poems on the Circus includes poems by D.H. Lawrence, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rainier Maria Rilke, P.K. Page, and Kenneth Koch, and the vibrant pochoir illustrations by Walter Bachinski are such a palette of primary colours that for a minute I was five years old, clinging to my dad's hand and heading into the big top!

Adventures with rats. Yes, the little house we rented near Fraser and King Edward had scritching/gnawing sounds going on in the walls at night. The couple we were renting from found this all but inexplicable. "It's not a tsunami" offered the trap-setter. "Would you like me to pick them up by their little tails?" queried the trap-setter's wife. Because we had the audacity to mention this, plus the fact we’d already mentioned there were only 3 rolls of toilet paper in the house, evoking protestations from the trap-setter's wife about how she couldn't possibly be expected to supply TP for 7 people (even though she'd been happy to RENT it to 7 people), we were referred to as being "high maintenance". Well, the old travel agent in me can assure you that our little group of scribes was anything but. We didn't, for example, call the health authorities. We didn't go ballistic about the lack of dusting and vacuuming. We left the place cleaner than we found it. And we'll not be going back.