Some personal geography, part 2. Today, La Provincia, the more serious & more locally inclined (it was started way back as Diario de Las Palmas) of the two major morning papers, ran an article about how one in five grancanarians live in what they termed "relative" poverty. That means they have 457€ or less to live on each month. & 60 000 persons have a monthly income of less than 228€. Having paid the rent for my room that would have left me with 18€ to live on for the month. & my rent is really quite low. Yes, there is real poverty on these islands & it is more widespread than I would have thought

Some personal geography. Most of this post was written yesterday evening just after sunset (at around eight)sitting on a stone bench looking out across my beach of choice, Alcaravaneras, & the container quays of Puerto de la Luz after a day under overcast skies bringing the, as it turned out vain, promise of rain. By then the clouds were slowly scattering but there was still this damp heat. Alcaravaneras is one of my favourite places in town despite the ceaseless traffic on the Avenida Maritima just a narrow sidewalk away. To me, its merits include that it's a small beach & never crowded with, mostly northern european, tourists & that it's near & looks out onto not only the container quays (an environment the importance of which to me I'm unable to explain in any language) but also the harbour entrance so there's often a ship (mostly freight, some ferries) arriving or departing & being loaded or unloaded. It awakens my life-long dream of going to sea. Well, maybe some day. Ye never can be sure. Yesterday, by the way, I got there just in time to watch MSC Camille - once built in 1970 & named M/S San Francisco as a sister ship to M/S Margaret Johnson (sold to be chopped up in 1987 after surrendering, among many other things her engine & propellers) on which I as a child crossed the oceans, along with my mother, younger brother & father who worked there, from Gothenburg to Harwich (in 1975), Australia (in 1977) & the US west coast (in 1982) - leave the quay & head southeast toward the Ivory Coast or some other country in that region. & that was a long sentence, although maybe not new. & by midnight the damp in the air was gone & the stars were out for a night on the skies. & my room on the roof was filling with the usual high, clear (not necessarily clean) air

Stephen Vincent, who should be no stranger to anyone interested in english-language poetry of recent decades, is doing a really cool thing on his blog. He calls it ghosts & it's a look at San Francisco - his town of choice - in photos & texts, mostly brief poems. The city that takes shape in these posts is that of someone who has lived there a long time & has gotten to know &, as it appears, mostly love it. I will follow this project with great interest & close attention. Also, in may, Shearsman published an e-book of his called Triggers, which I downloaded in early june, a couple of weeks or so before starting this blog. At the time I began a review of/essay on it, which got lost sometime during the summer. As soon as I get access to a pdf-reader again, I will reread it. But the fact that I wanted & started to comment on it is a recommendation in itself to download & read it

(well, it is an island)

bought a morning

paper received a

plastic introduce coin

fish - serranus

cabrilla minimum

authorized introduce

coin length 15

centimetres

1
how come hearing
& hating are so much
alike in spanish?

2
a sign above Avenida Maritima
says alcohol + driving = accident

3
closed for reforms

4
please don't feed
the iron dogs

5
i will sacrifice my
sandals to the
green man walking

My extended absence from blogging was caused by moving from sweden to Gran Canaria, one of the seven islands off the coast from Morocco & West Sahara, that are formally spanish territory with fairly far reaching autonomy. For instance the Canary Islands are not a part of the EU. The move took more organizing than I could imagine so I barely even had time to write poems beyond small simple haikuesque ones, let alone maintain correspondence not directly connected to the move, for which I extend my apologies. Things will now slowly return to normal in all things, except my relation to my immediate surroundings, a good thing indeed. These days I´m thinking a lot about using three languages almost simultaneously (& thinkig in all three by turns); spanish which I can understand but so far barely use, for things quotidian; english for most correspondence & all poetry & swedish for some correspondence. It twists your sense of communication somewhat, I can tell you. I may post something on thyat in time. Concerning posts, they may not be as frequent as before, but they will be more carefully planned. That has to do with working from public computers where there's a time limit.

It seems the fall issues of Shampoo & Can We Have Our Ball Back? are under public construction. Also Dusie is accepting submissions for the third issue, the second one just having been put online & a grand one it is.