So, the whole Daylight Saving Time thing. Bleah. Tomorrow evening I have the 6-9 pm shift on the reference desk, and there will still be some light in the sky when I go home. On the other hand, for the next couple-three weeks, on the days that I work a normal 8-5 schedule the sun won't have risen yet when I go in to work. I am on the wrong damn side of the time zone for this crap, is what it is.
We're still fairly new to this springingforwardfallingback thing here in Indiana, and many of us are still cranky about it.
I mean really. I almost forgot to listen to Little Steven's Underground Garage on the radio tonight, because it comes on at 7 pm and it was still bright and sunny then and didn't seem possible that it was already time for evening things to start.
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Today was sunny, then cloudy, then the wind kicked up and then they issued a tornado watch and then it got dark and there was a gust so hard I grabbed on to my head inside my house just to make sure it didn't blow away, and then it rained like crazy, then the clouds raced away and it was brilliant blue springtime and a yard full of robins.
If you didn't think Indiana was very much Midwestern, think again.
There was a fair amount of tornado damage about 50 miles south of me, but we escaped entirely unscathed, this time.
Funny enough, on Friday evening I attended a National Weather Service storm-spotter training session. Just in time, eh? It was pretty interesting, and as a bonus, the language of severe weather is pretty ripe for stealing into poetry. Tornadogenesis, rear-flank downdraft, wall cloud, shelf cloud, squall line, beaver tail.
Yes, beaver tail.
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Not going anywhere this month. In April, I'm off to Denver for a few quick days to visit my sister and catch a Springsteen show. Then in May I'll hop up to my mom's for Mother's Day and from there to Chicago for, yes, another Springsteen show. In July I'm back to Chicago for the American Library Association conference.
More hotels this year than usual for me, that's for sure.
I'm also hoping to make a trip to Cleveland sometime this year to see this exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It's, uh, research for some poems. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Where would you travel in the name of researching poems?
5 comments:
Anywhere if I had the money. I researched an 11 line poem about Audubon for over a year. I was lucky then, to be able to travel to Key West twice during that year.
Lesbian Poet Using Term Beaver Tail in Poem -CNN.com
I can see it now.
I love weather words in poems. One I haven't used yet, but it may turn up at some point (actually two words) is "hook echo." If I remember correctly, it refers to a characteristic shape in a Dopler radar image, which indicates the site of a possible incipient tornado.
In 1984 I went to Los Angeles and then spent the next five days traveling with a poet friend north along the west coast to the northern end of the Puget Sound. I didn't go there specifically as research for a poem, though as it turns out, shortly after I got back I started working on an extended series of connected poems growing out of the trip. It turned into the major project of my writing life, and at present I'm somewhere near the end of the overall book.
Aside from that, places I'd love to go for the poem potential include Paris, the Greek Islands, southern Spain, maybe somewhere in Japan... for that matter, traveling by train, say, from Minneapolis (actually it would be St. Paul, where the depot is) south along the length of the Mississippi River to New Orleans.
A year or two back a poet friend of mine was organizing a writers' trip to Europe -- the travel schedule included a stop at Auschwitz. Clearly a heavier more somber kind of "research." I wasn't able to go, but I would have gone if I'd been able to work it out.
RK - Key West is very, very high on my "places I really want to go someday" list. Sigh! Someday...
Hi Anne. To YOU--yes, KEY WEST! I got a glimpse of it, waaaaay back in 1990, with a then-beau and his parents. But it rained all day. :(
To MM--I was LOL-ing on Anne's "beaver tail" comment. You and Anne are both hilarious!
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