Around the Place, white tents sheltering poetry publishers, mostly small presses, but so many of them and how attractive their volumes are: generally sober with text rather than images on the cover. Then there's a central tent with a stage and microphones and some white plastic garden chairs for listeners and lookers. Yesterday I listened to two Korean poets, Lee Sumyeong and Park Sangsoon, read, sponsored by the bilingual review, La Traductière. They both read again later in day at the Café Les Éditeurs at the Carrefour de l'Odéon, along with a poet from Japan, one from the UK, and two or three French poets.

In the morning I had been to the flower market on the Ile St Louis; the plants on our kitchen balcony (a grand word for a couple square metres of territory really meant to hold mops and buckets) were dead on (my) arrival and I needed to replace them quickly with something living, swaying, green, light-capturing. Furniture is all very well, but it just sits there, unchanging; a plant or two changes everything, brings it all to life.

The weather? Sunny, summery in a way northern California never is, although I would also say, not at all contradictorily, that Palo Alto has an ideal climate, hot during the day, cool at night, cool foggy mornings. Here the weather is sultry-summery, you don't need or want a sweater in the evening. It feels very different, I mean life under this weather feels different: streets full of people attesting to a change in the air.

Beverley Bie Brahic