It rained most of the day yesterday, but I was out and about nonetheless. I met the kids for breakfast, and then P and I went to the Frick and afterward the Strand, where I managed to make my way through fiction shelves A-G before P was ready to leave. Next time maybe I'll reach H-M, but maybe not. Shopping at the Strand is a very slow job. I did find a beautiful early 1950s edition of Henry Green's novel Concluding, and since I suspect I am one of the few people alive who actually reads his writings, that felt like a secret message. It was skewed to one side, half-obscured on a bottom shelf, and I almost didn't bend down to look at it. But there the book sat, waiting for me.

 I've seen three musicals on Broadway: Pippin and Fun Home, both with Paul in high school, and now Ragtime. Pippin was a big fun spectacle, and Fun Home was small and gorgeous and heartrending, but Ragtime manages to combined elements of both and become a heartrending spectacle. It includes a huge ensemble cast, brings a Model T on stage, and includes a dozen disparate settings, including the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the emotions, though also large, remain complicated and ambiguous. Even though it's a musical, its language hews surprisingly close to Doctorow's, and the singers were top-notch.

It was a fun day altogether: for lunch I ate a fried oyster po' boy at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central; for dinner I had chicken in coconut sauce at a Cuban restaraurant near Lincoln Center. I visited with friends at the bar after the show, and then I slept hard till after 7 this morning.

In a little while I'll meet the kids for breakfast, and then I think P and I will go to the Frick. The Polish Rider is waiting for me.

 Good morning from the bus. It's already daylight, and I've already had a crisis: I left the whitefish bagel sandwich I'd bought especially for the trip in Tom's truck, so I had to text him frantically to turn around and bring it back to me. The thought of no breakfast, no comforting delicious special sandwich, was very sorrowful. However, he heroically reappeared with my breakfast, and the surrounding passengers very much enjoyed the dramatic handoff. And now I am hoping that a lost-and-found sandwich will be my only panic of the day.

A surprising thing happened yesterday: I put together a manuscript.

I think it's a tad too short in its current iteration. Nonetheless, it's complete, even down to the table of contents and an acknowledgments page. As sometimes happens, I had a burst of focus, when suddenly an arc became clear to me and the poems began to talk to one another and I began to talk back to them and, voila, a fluttering sheaf transformed into the possibility of a book.

I feel nervous and excited, like I always do at these moments. Yesterday evening I kept opening the file to fidget with it, and often my fidgeting was no more than making the pages larger or smaller on my screen so that I could absorb their visual effect. At this stage making a collection is so much more than just reading the poems for content. It requires simply looking at them . . . and then at other moments simply hearing the silences between them . . . for every poem is surrounded by a different silence, and how that quiet overlaps feels so important to me.

The most recent New Yorker includes Kathryn Schulz's review of Richard Holmes's biography of Tennyson. Schulz opens it by asking, "What was the formative sound of your childhood?" and then speculates on the sea's influence on Tennyson's ear:

No one alive can say if this is true, but I like to think the sound that most shaped [him] was the surf at Mablethorpe, a barren stretch of beach on the remote eastern coast of England. . . . Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation--a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him.

As an ear poet myself, as a recent wallower in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, as a person in the midst of putting together a poetry collection in a rush of wonder (a collection that happens to include a long poem titled "In Memoriam" that refers throughout to Tennyson) . . . well, is it any surprise that I was gobsmacked by this description?

"Both perfect and unpredictable." The words alone make me feel a little faint.

After a weekend of lethargy, I did manage to get a lot of stuff done yesterday. Not only did I finish the housework, but I also prepped for my high schoolers, drafted prompts for the conference's writing intensive, and wrote the speech portion of my MCELA presentation.  Getting ready for that presentation is turning out to involve a ton of work. I'm supposed to fill 90 minutes, which is a crazy amount of time to be on stage. So I'm putting together a hybrid show--talk/experiential writing activity/reading. Creating each of those pieces of course requires a different sort of approach, plus I need to concoct the transitions between them . . . as you can probably guess, it's a beast of an assignment. However, thanks to this sudden unexpected editing drought, I am making progress. I wonder how I would have managed without it.

Today I'll keep chipping away at the presentation. I also need to do some mending, and I hope to get back to sorting through my pile of collection possibilities. I should order garden seeds. I should dust the dining room. I should read Aurora Leigh. I'll go for a walk. I'm presently revisiting David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America, but that book is too heavy to take on the bus so I'll need to come up with another travel volume. This is always my giant challenge: how to find a book that's light enough to carry around the city and long enough to last me through two six-hour bus trips. And it needs to be absorbing enough to hold my attention but not so complex that I can't also surf the disruptions of public transportation. What will it be?

I guess it's Washington's Birthday today, but neither T nor I gets the day as a holiday. Soon he will drive off as usual to the house he's renovating, and I'll need to turn my attention to my weekly housework chores and then deal with a pile of teaching prep: high school session, conference prompts, MCELA presentation. Fortunately, however, my head cold is beginning to dissipate. It's not gone by any means, but I am feeling somewhat better this morning. Though I didn't manage to be energetic yesterday, I did accomplish the grocery shopping and I even stopped at a clothing store and bought myself a new pair of jeans . . . not at all my favorite activity, so I was a little bit proud of myself. Also I haven't gotten fatter since the last time I bought jeans. Success!

New York is on the horizon, and I'm trying to pull together some activities for myself. I'd like to go to the Frick and see the Gainsborough exhibit and lay eyes on Rembrandt's Polish Rider. Like the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, that painting is one of my touchstones, and I need to visit it now and again. There are a couple of interesting photo exhibits in Chelsea (William Eggleston and Arthur Tress); the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is donation-only in the winter, so it would be cheap to wander among the orchids in the glass houses. I'd also like to wander among the used books in the Strand. Who knows what of any of this I'll accomplish, but it's good to have ideas.

And I've got poems on my mind. I printed out a stack of finished pieces and I've slowly been relearning them, slowly beginning to imagine them as a conversation among themselves. It's a tentative first step toward a new collection.

 Despite head cold and family chaos, Valentine's Day turned out to be very sweet. First, T and I walked out to the French bakery for croissants. Then we went to a 10 a.m. showing of Casablanca at what my friend Gretchen calls "the Lie-Down Theater"--it's got broad seats with footrests and reclining backs that are silly and also extremely restful. I'm not sure I've ever seen Casablanca on the big screen before, and it was definitely worth it. Usually I don't think of this as my favorite Bogart film: I so love him with Bacall in The Big Sleep and Key Largo that I have generally been content to slot Casablanca into the category of "everyone else's favorite." But really it's a great movie: tight construction, wonderful acting, a complex and interesting Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere situation. And watching it at 10 a.m. on a recliner was an excellent choice. To top off our good day, we went out to dinner at a friend's house, a long and comfortable evening of wine and chatter followed by an easy 3-minute drive home and an actual night's sleep.

With such relaxations as aid, I feel this morning that I might possibly be winning my argument with the head cold. A little less congestion. A little less groggy self-pitying resignation. Good riddance to both.

So far, all of my big weekend plans to accomplish a lot of complicated reading, etc., have devolved into spending my spare moments sitting under a couch blanket next to a cup of tea and a crossword puzzle. But so goes convalescence. Today I hope to run errands, do some housework, and feel less like a wet mop. Wish me luck.