So I'm alone and drunk....

...so it's probably a good time to finish my Vancouver story. First of all, Kate and I ate in good restaurants. That was my fault. We got Juliana Spahr and Peter Gizzi and some other people to go to Brix with us and well I had a really good Seafood Chowder. We also swam at the Marriot as much as possible but then there was a SoftSkull party and Kate made me get out of my swimsuit and go to the pub and meet Softskull people because well I just wrote this novel etc. And there was this great panel on the new nature poetry that was run by Josh Corey was Sally oh I forget her last name because I'm drunk Sally. Sally Keith that's it. She talked aboutInger Christensen as a nature poet. Christensen is a poet from Denmark. She wrote two books that I bought in German translation when I lived in Berlin. I saw her read at this summer poetry festival at the Literature House on Majokovsky Ring in Berlin. I didn't know anything about her but I saw this elderly woman come onto stage in a Brown skirt and balzer set with a brown handbag -- looking like every woman over 55 on the East German rail and I started to laugh because of the brown handbag. There was something about the handbag that made her seem like my grandma and the thought of my grandma reading poetry -- well it wasn't really possible -- but then this woman began to read in Danish the most beautiful sonnet sequence called The Butterfly Requiem. And the next day I went to the local bookstore and bought two German translations of her work but had no idea she had ever been translated into English and suddenly at the AWP there was Sally Keith (an excellent breathless poet) reading and discussing Christensens THE ALPHABET. It's out from New Directiona. And Josh Corey discussed Zukofsky as a nature poet and this grad student whose name elludes me now discussed Eleni Sikeleinos THE CALIFORNIA POEM as a pastoral poem and somewhere Lisa Jarnot was mentioned. It was very fascinating and now I've learned from his website that Corey is writing his dissertation about the Avant-garde Pastoral. I like his work. It brought my people to the AWP. And this idea of people and not my people at the AWP I will discuss soon when I'm sober. Love, Magdalena.