You are busy being born the whole first ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying. . . . "Being born" here is an open and existential category: the gaining of experience, a living intensely in the present, after which comes the long period of life when a person is finished with the new. This "dying" doesn't have to be negative. It too is an open and existential category of being: the age when the bulk of your experience, the succession of days lived in the present, are mostly over. You turn reflective, interior, to examine and sort and tally. You reach a point where so much is behind you, but its scenes continue to exist somewhere, as memory and absence at once, as images you'll never see again.

None of it matters; it is gone. But it all matters; it lingers. The whole of youthful experience has slid away, the years and the people, the moments and feelings. In all that loss, a person continues to locate little tokes of joy from new and surprising places. Still learning, still becoming. Busy being born, and busy dying. You have a present, a now, even as you drag with you a snowballing bulk of what was. Sometimes you spike a new joy, you really do, and sometimes you hit an old one, and the more you've lived the more there are of the old ones.

                                         --Rachel Kushner, "The Hard Crowd"

**

Much of Kushner's essay "The Hard Crowd" circles around memories of growing up in San Francisco in the 80s and early 90s. She and I did not have the same childhood: Kushner is four years younger than I am, brought up by unconventional beatnik communist parents, immersed early in the grit of the city, intensely social, whereas I was brought up by isolated parents who seemed older than they actually were, who inhabited the mores and fears of an earlier generation, who were deeply nostalgic for an idealized rural past. Nonetheless, our worlds overlap, and not only in terms of pop culture and the historical moment (Also, oddly, we have the same birthday.) Among other things, both of us are the daughters of educated parents and both found ourselves, for chunks of our lives, immersed in worlds where people have no conception of books or art as mentorship or security. In those situations one can become, in Kushner's words, "the soft one" . . . or perhaps be revealed as such, for surely that is what we always were.

The excerpt I shared from "The Hard Crowd" both surprised me and did not. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been talking for months about the sensation of having reached a moment of reckoning in our work as poets. For the most part we have stopped envying the trappings of success. We no longer strive for attention in journals and contests. We've stopped castigating ourselves for not being famous. We've "turn[ed] reflective, interior"; we "examine and sort and tally." This wrestling has been a central element of our Poetry Lab conversations, a commonality among us, though I am younger than the other two by a decade. But as Kushner points out, dying is a "long period of life."

Still, I was surprised to see these thoughts framed so jauntily. That's not to discount the note of elegy in her words, but "little tokes of joy" felt so cheerful, and also accurate. This dying business is interesting, absorbing, comical, and at times almost subversive. It keeps me busy and entertained. It is like sorting through piles at a yard sale: junk mugs, junk baseball hats, junk record albums, junk chairs . . . and then, suddenly, a random postcard becomes a portal. O past. O whiff of rust and bones and pulsing life.

This will be a short note as I have been up all night dealing with yet another round of bat problems. I have reached the end of my tether. Clearly something must be done.

However, there is some comic relief: I have been receiving spam comments on this blog suggesting I click on a link to rent an industrial dock crane. Perhaps many poets long for good deals on dock cranes.

I've been reading a book of essays by Rachel Kushner and had plans to quote from one of them today. But I am too tired to copy out anything accurately, so that will have to wait.

Chuck thinks bats are cool.

I'm happy to announce that registration has opened for the 2026 Conference on Poetry & Learning at Monson Arts. And for the first time ever, we're going to reprise the entire faculty from the previous year's conference. Gretchen Berg and Gwyneth Jones were tremendous gifts to the program last year, and Teresa and I are can't wait to work with them again next summer.

Our theme will be transformation and, as we did last year, we will bring poetry into conversation with other art forms, both in our discussions and our generative work.

I hope to see you in Monson this summer, but if you can't attend and/or if you have the means, I beg you to consider supporting our scholarship fund. In this current political climate, fewer and fewer schools are allotting funds to teachers for professional development. Last year we saw a sharp rise in requests for scholarships, and we did not have enough in reserve to support everyone in need. The conference is an exercise in humanity, intellect, emotion, and collaboration. We are staunch in our belief in art and community as a power for good in this world. If you can, please help us continue to serve.

 The last sentence of Little Dorrit: 

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

A sentence late in The Waves:

It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.

I read both of these sentences yesterday, and both echoed in my chest. But now that I write them side by side I also see that they are the same. The streets, the people. Memory and love. The uproar. The strange. Separation and immersion.

And then the use of punctuation: so individual to each novelist, so perfectly placed.

I think about why I love books so much, why I reread with such stubborn dedication. These recognitions are part of it. The swift interlacing of craft with perception. The common humanity. I linger at the street corner, in sunshine and shade. Arm in arm, Charles and Virginia nod to me as they pass by.

I started my drive home yesterday in rain and snow, but the weather softened by the time I reached southern New Hampshire traffic, which was a help.  I spent the bulk of my afternoon on the couch with a Dickens novel, which was restorative, after a weekend of hardly reading anything at all. But then I got a call to say that my son's partner is in the hospital, which ratcheted the worry back up. Unclear what is actually going on, but they've been sick for a few weeks and things seem to be snowballing. Today we should learn more.

It's been raining all night and will rain more later in the day, but I hope to squeeze in a walk. I'll get caught up on laundry and work on an editing project. I'll go out to the fish market. I'll hope for the best.

I'll be heading home at daylight, an attempt to avoid the steady rain coming in from the west. Happy to own four new tires, but the sight of snow in the mountains on Friday doesn't make me want to linger in the mountains today.

Talk to you tomorrow--

Without incident, Tina the elderly Subaru made her doughty way across rivers and mountains into the Champlain Valley and spent a comfortable overnight parked on a hillock of grass in the cold rain.

Now at very first light, the Greens are a rumple of dark blue through the kitchen window and the Adirondacks are a rumple of dark blue through the living room window, and the cat of the house sourly waits for me to notice that it's breakfast time.

I have been rereading Dickens's Little Dorrit and have reached the part of the book when the Dorrit family has magically transformed from impoverished debtors in the Marshalsea Prison into a rich and haughty entourage crossing the Alps on their way to a Venetian palazzo. Little Dorrit, the shy, hardworking backbone of the poor family, has suddenly become useless in the rich family. Now she has no one to take care of. All she can do is stare out the window in wonder and imagine what is happening among the people of the prison, now that she can no longer see them, or even admit their existence.

In many ways Little Dorrit is an irritating character--the epitome of Dickens's obstinate pipe dreams about sweet, self-effacing child-women. But she is curious. She imagines. And these characteristics, in her new life as the daughter of a rich man, become liabilities. They reveal too much. She is constantly being told to show less wonder.

I have been thinking this morning about that sad fate. To never show surprise. To never be surprised.

The daylight is strengthening. I can glimpse the shapes of cows in the field beyond the house, thick black and white torsos, heads hidden among the dry stems.