Reporting from Maine

Saturday we made the 400 mile drive up to Glen Cove, ME, a little hamlet between Rockport and Rockland and just south of Camden arriving at Anne's Seaside Cottage which looks out (some tree blockage) on Clam Cove that leads out to Penobscot Bay (memories of many years spent on Great Spruce Head Island). The cottage is just right, two bedrooms, a large living room with an open kitchen and a big deck. The yard is huge, full of gardens and flowers and Cannonball runs and runs. It's a short walk to the beach, all very pretty. I think I may have also found two ponds nearby where the fishing will be good. Just haven't had the interest (yet).

After a good lunch in Camden at Cappy's (named for Cappy Quinn, of the Quinn family that has run the mail boat to GSHI for years), we dropped Jesse off on Sunday at the Maine Media Workshop (in Rockport) where he is studying black and white photography as well as how to use a darkroom. He seems to be doing well, though we haven't seen any of the work. He's living at a motel converted into a dorm, four to a room. Room-mates seem like good people.

Meanwhile, Katherine and I have been doing a little of this, little of that. Lunch in Camden yesterday where we set on a deck and looked out at the harbor.Katherine has been drawing and painting, working both indoors and on the deck. I've been writing some, a new poem, work on my arts of sport course for the fall, work on Jose Maria Hinojosa. I've printed Jesse's screenplay Cleaver and the Eye which I expect to do some work on in the next couple of days. I also want to start screening the rough draft of his Poet in New York dvd which I can do in short bunches but want to have some things to say about it before I see him (hopefully this weekend, though he may decide to stay at the dorm over the weekend--last night when we talked he said it was a possibility).

We were finally able to figure out a way for me to get the Hinojosa books from Spain: wire transfer. The whole thing was a little nutty because the books are 17 euros a piece and the postage is 21. Add the wire transfer cost and the postage and it's 39 euros and the books are only 34.

Meanwhile the Hinojosa poems do make me a little nuts. There are all these wonderful lines and images and then he adds one which in Spanish makes perfect sense but in English just becomes strange and even bad (a wonderful poem about the amazon and the andes ends with the question why he wears no loincloth!). It's a challenge, too, because there are times he seems to be fooling around with syntax that looks simple but is really complicated and all meaning gets messed up. Since he is caught up in the surreal the question of meaning is blurred anyway, but still...

Mid-afternoon. Clearly time for lunch. More later.

Saludos!

Mark