Tomorrow evening I'm reading at the Rockland Library with Dave Morrison, and then on Saturday I'm doing a panel thing at the Plunkett Festival in Augusta. If you're able to attend either event, I'd love to see you. But possibly you're giving your own reading. At least in Maine, National Poetry Month tends to get ridiculously overscheduled: for instance, I have two friends who are reading in two other midcoast libraries tomorrow night. This seems to suggest the likelihood of three very small audiences.

I'm still working away at my gargantuan reading project, which has presently devolved into an examination of the French and Indian War. Though my intention has been to stay focused on western Pennsylvania, the war itself did no such thing. So I have been spiraling though upstate New York, Nova Scotia, and northern New England, which in my mind have now compressed themselves into a confused wilderness punctuated by inadequate forts, large bodies of water, and self-interested marauders. These include figures such as Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who believed that infecting Indians with smallpox was a fine diplomatic strategy, and whose name today connotes not genocide but liberal college town. They also include the Ojibwa and Ottawa warriors, under French leadership, who attacked an Ohio fort, killed an English trader and a Miami chief, and then ritually ate them. And don't forget the Quakers, whose Pennsylvania province, founded in 1681, "could safely dispense with a militia because it effectively outsourced defense to Indian allies whom no one expected to live according to pacifist principles." (I'm quoting Fred Anderson's The War That Made America, a brief but intense survey of the conflict.) Add to the mix an incompetent, baby-faced George Washington, a few crazy European monarchs, swarms of blackflies, horrible mountain passes, and the fact that the names of everything keep changing from French to English to French to English. What a mess.