I am having a terrible time concentrating on my writing. Part of the problem is that my house is always full of boys, what with these damn snow days and sick days and weekends, etc. But blaming other people is disingenuous: when I'm writing, I have no trouble ignoring my children. The problem is me.

Probably I should start copying out poems again, which often helps. But at the moment I'm not even all that interested in poetry. I don't know what I am interested in exactly, but whatever it is seems to involve fervent human communication. I am a chatterbox these days, epistolarily and otherwise. Maybe being a chatterbox is part of the writing cycle, just like being a recluse is.

Thumbing through Bartlett's for inspiration, I came across this small quotation from Ogden Nash's "A Parable for Sports Writers":

A regular poet published a book,

And an excellent book it was,

But nobody gave it a second look,

As nobody often does.

A good notion to keep in mind, I suppose, in those heady moments when we imagine ourselves to be the next Shakespeare. Also, I recently learned that Milton earned a total of 10 pounds from Paradise Lost. Alas.