Sweaty Stroll

 

Baby, it is hot outside!

 

This morning in Northampton  I was running around doing all sorts of errands. It was hard to do anything in the ninety degree temperatures, but I knew it would only get hotter as the day progressed.

Despite the heatwave, the diligence of the defenders against sexism remains unflagging as they correct this sign which implies that only men do construction work.

 

 

I stopped by the offices of The Valley Advocate on Conz Street and chatted with some of my friends such as Tom Vannah, editor of the Advocate but perhaps even better known as half of the popular radio team Collins and Vannah.



We talked about fishing, Ted Kennedy and J. Wesley Miller. Reporter Stephanie Kraft took this picture of the two Toms.

It turned out that radio folks were everywhere, with the always charmingly urbane Valley Free Radio star Mary Serreze  relaxing outside behind the Haymarket Cafe. 

We talked of blogging, photography and Paolo Mastrangelo.

I always check this paper-box:

Drive By Poets is a kind of dadaist consciousness expansion group that gathers poetry, prints copies of the best poems, and then run all over the Valley leaving their poems everywhere to be found by innocent passerby. As they put it on their website:

Drive-By Poets is a non-profit public poetry postering project in Northampton, Massachusetts. Anyone may submit poems to DriveByPoets@gmail.com. Every few weeks week we choose one, print a hundred or so, & blitz the bulletin boards, bookstores, launderettes, libraries, & bathroom walls until they're gone. This blog has many of the poems we've posted. Feel free to submit your work.

Here's a recent sample:

This white unswaying place

I'm sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply gleaming

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
Anid I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.

-LAURIE SHECK