Thank you, Julie. Another year above ground. :-)

Cheers,
John

That's truly good news, John.

Thanks, Mark. I prefer it to the alternative.

Cheers,
John

I wrote a new poem today, the first I've written in over three months. Hooray for the end of the dead period.

In other good news, at the local used bookstore today I finally found a copy of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that doesn't have a fucking deckle edge.

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This Just In: My house has been cleared of all my roommate’s many truckloads of stuff at long last. Now I can take a load off my feet. I even cleared the air with frankincense.

An anthology of children's poems that I'm in called One Minute Till Bedtime has appeared in German translation, Jetzt Noch Ein Gedicht, Und Dann Aus Das Licht. Every poem in the book has been translated into German by various translators. It seems to me the translators did a pretty fine job, in most cases preserving at least a very good semblance of rhyme and meter.

My poem in the book has actually been translated before, oddly enough. When I first posted it here a long time ago, Nestor sent me a translation of the poem into Polish. But as far as I know, that translation has never been published.

Jayne and all, eight days ago I presented a little papillon of a paper to the Classical Association of the Atlantic States on efforts to solve the problem of when the Roman poet Catullus was born and passed on. He’s the author of Odi et amo - “I hate and I love,” as well as searingly hostile feelthy squibs about Julius Caesar and his team, and some funny stuff, like #13 about a perfume that makes the smeller want to be entirely a nose. I was rewriting and correcting the room handout almost until we boarded the Amtrak train. Be that as it may, the presentation went pretty Aswan High Dam well, and was movied by a daughter. Jayne’s and Julie Steiner’s help and shoving last year were essential to keeping me going. Fwiw, Isbell’s fellow student in England, Gareth Williams, has a jolly little footnote. I’m still sandpapering the message, and dare to think the paper just might eventually advance general knowledge a smidge about who kissed whom in Rome and other stuff in the late 50s BC and maybe a squeak later. Fun it was.

I'm going to see the wonderful English folk band The Unthanks on Monday night at the New Vic theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme, performing the poems of Emily Bronte set to music. I'm going all on my lonesome, too, which is just how I like that sort of thing. Can't wait. Here's a little taste, it's quite beautiful.

https://youtu.be/wjxZ-VbUihI