Back from Cincinnati

I had a lovely time at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference in Cincinnati. The second-best part of the conference was going not once, but twice, to Graeter's for ice cream, right across the street from our hotel; both times I had black raspberry chococolate chip and it was scrumptious. The first-best part of the conference was sitting in the gorgeous bar of the gorgeous Hilton Netherland Plaza Hotel (a 1930s art deco gem on the National Register of Historic Places), with beloved former graduate student friends, drinking pomegranate martins and listening to the piano player deliver schmaltzy versions of "Embraceable You" and "More" (which I so loved when I sang it in Girls' Chorus in 10th grade, imagining myself singing it to Dick Thistle: "More - than the greatest love the world has known! This - is the love I give you to you - alone!")

The papers were good, too.

But now I'm home, and I have to return to real life, where there is a distinct absence of Graeter's ice cream (though one of my Facebook friends told me that I can buy it in the freezer aisle at King Soopers - but would that be the same?) and pomegranate martinis. And a distinct presence of heaps and heaps of midterm grading.

Luckily, I also agreed with two other poet friends to take on Tupelo Press's new poetry challenge, this time writing poems where either the title or the first line has to be a fragment from Sappho. Some of the most delicious ones are:

"the one with violets in her lap
"if not, winter"
"no more than the bird with the piercing voice"

I do have to start grading midterms today, but first, Sappho. . .