WhimsyLand

Door County was pretty much everything it was cracked up to be.  Not that I knew what that was, other than the famous Fish Boils.  That's Sweet Junie in front of the the Sklaarkirke (or something equally Scandinavian) which is actually of recent vintage, stuck in the woods and open to all visitors.  I had no idea that Door County was a peninsula, something that an antique store owner mentioned should be made more evident in their travel literature.  Peninsular as it was, we drove along Green Bay visiting Fish Creek, Ephraim (famous for being a dry city), Sister Bay and Gills Rock.  We ferried over to Washington Island and back to tour the other side of the peninsula that overlooks Lake Michigan, taking in Baileys Harbor and Jacksonport.  We actually stayed on the Green Bay side in Egg Harbor, population 250.  The whole trip was splendid and I highly recommend it for Midwesterners (or anybody else, I suppose) looking for great views, good restaurants, and interesting antique stores.  Also, the only "oil shop" in the US, featuring dozens of kinds of olive oil (Junie bought some macadamia nut oil).  Even more so if you can wander around in the spring or fall when the rates are low and the traffic non-existent.

That latest issue of Poetry is still sitting on my desk.  Featured this month are Eavan Boland, Gottfried Benn in translation, and Robert Pinsky.  Pinsky is positively Muldoonish in Gulf Music:  "Mallah walla tella bella.  Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la, / Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bellw, wella-wah. // The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated / Galveston, Texas.  Some 8,000 people died."   A diverting piece and halfway through I'm beginning to wonder if this is Atakapa dialect or something similar interspersed throughout the piece.  Boland is pretty true to form, this from House of Shadows, Home of Simile:  "One afternoon of summer rain / my hand skimmed a shelf and I found / an old florin.  Ireland, 1950. // ... // And how in the cool shado of nowhere / a salmon leaps up to find a weir / it could not even know / was never there."  I liked Robert Vandermolen's Muscle :  "I had anticipated hiring a detective / But realized that I was better off without so many possessions — / Though I may miss the pieces of glass I found / In the ocean, and, of course, those Japanese fishing floats — / Yet I remain curious who he's seeing, that fat bitch / with a nose job, that college slut with the long rubbery nipples,"  but mainly liked it because you see so little of this kind of thing in Poetry. 

There's quite a bit more, but I'm out of time.  More, tomorrow.  Promise.