Blustery bits

It's cold and blustery outside, wind blowing bright yellow leaves across the still-green lawns. (Well, I assume about the yellow and the green -- the colors were there a couple of hours ago, but now it's dark out.) I have finally given in and turned on the heat. Sigh.

Busy week upcoming -- Indigo Girls concert tomorrow night, Mary Oliver reading Thursday night -- both in the same venue, Clowes Hall on the Butler University campus in Indianapolis, just under two hours from where I live. I haven't seen the Indigo Girls for two years (though I caught Amy Ray's solo show last year) so it will be very good to see them again. Besides the fact that I love their music and admire their political activism, Amy & Emily are two of the nicest human beings you could ever hope to meet -- which makes it all the more fun to support them. The other night in Toronto, they had to leave the stage mid-encore because the venue had a very strict curfew with a huge fine they'd have to pay for breaking it. So what did they do? Why, they got their guitars and they went outside and they played their usual last song, "Galileo," in the street for those fans who had stuck around. Someone even put a video of it up on Google Video (I think that link should work). It's kind of dark, and mostly what you hear is the crowd cheering and singing along, but still, how cool!

I am looking forward to Mary Oliver's reading, too. I know a lot of poets nowadays don't care for her, but I like her well enough, and I've never heard her read before. I glanced through her new book in one of our mega-chain bookstores last week, and there's a lot of God stuff in it, which makes me uneasy; she's always written about religious-ish stuff, of course, but she hasn't in the past said "God" quite so directly quite so often. Oh well. She just lost her partner of many many years not that long ago, and I guess if anything will send a person to religion, that sort of thing probably will.

Eduardo notes that Blackbird will be including a previously-unpublished Sylvia Plath poem in their November issue. The last I'd heard was that they were still negotiating the specifics of the rights, so I'm pleased to know that it's really going to happen. All the more so because my own poem "Opening the Hive" will be in the same issue. (And yes, I think it's extra amusing that my poem uses bee-related imagery, given that Plath wrote a bunch of bee poems herself!)

That's it from here, I guess. Back to the laundry.