Spent some time today working on someone else's book, then some time on my current poem-under-construction, and finally started my du Maurier essay before I threw up my hands and went snowshoeing.

The poem is so absorbing that I'm having a hard time leaving it alone. I keep running upstairs to stare at the manuscript lying on my desk--not to read it, just to see it. It's a new angle for me, this poem. With the Phaeton poem I wrote earlier this winter, I experimented with retelling an existing myth. But here I'm taking an existing fairy tale and reconfiguring it as a weight-of-marriage poem--trying to deal with the central character's erotic discovery and disappointment and also the internal difficulties she faces in leaving one home in order to create another. What's more, I'm making use of an intrusive authorial voice alongside a more general omniscience, something I admire very much in, say, the novels of George Eliot but that can be cloying in a second-rate Anthony Trollope potboiler (not that I don't love a good Trollope novel, but they're exceedingly variable). So I'm a little worried.

Still, it's very interesting to be engaged with these kinds of characterization and structural details while trying to maintain a poem's linguistic and imaginative intensity. It also feels good to take my own emotions off the front burner but nonetheless to remain emotionally overwrought about what I'm writing, which for me at least seems to be an essential element of the process of writing poetry. I have to feel slightly sick, like I've spent the day crying--yet another example (as if you needed another one) of why writing is nothing at all like therapy.

And now I'm off to drive a kid to a piano lesson. He's learning a Kanye West song, and he's so excited about it. If I'd asked my violin teacher to let me learn a song off the radio, he would have gnashed his teeth and cursed me in unintelligible Polish, and just possibly he would have bitten me. Some things do change for the better.