On This Day Last Year...

I was 12 months into an 18 month trip around the world. So far, I had bowed before shrines in Nikko, Japan, drunk vodka with Russian "little bosses" on a ship to Vladivostok, ridden the Trans-Siberian train across Russia, seen the 83-year-dead body of Lenin, walked inside the Rhone Glacier, swam in Como Lake and the Adriatic, oggled at Jose Plecnik's architecture in Ljubljana, hitch-hiked across the Albanian border, walked around the Acropolis, sipped coffee inside the walls of Dubrovnik, visited the Aphrodite temples on Cyprus, and driven a donkey cart through the Siwa oasis in Egypt.

On this day last year, I was counting animals in Tanzania.

Oppen at 100.

Poets House will host a Centennial celebration of the life and works of George Oppen, 1968 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Of Being Numerous. The event begins at 3 pm with a panel discussion, "Biographical-Historical Continuum", followed by "Literary-Philosophical Spectrum" at 5 pm and a reading at 7:30 which will include more than a dozen poets. If you're in the city and can make it, I'll see you there. If you can't make it, let me know and I will offer up reverence to the great ghost for you.

You and You.

If you're anywhere near Woodstock on Saturday, April 12, stop in to see Cornelia Hediger's work at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street. The opening and artist's talk are from 5 to 7 pm.