I've spent the morning preparing for my Saturday-morning gig for the Maine Poets Society. I'll be talking about terza rima, reading some exemplars of the form, and then announcing the winners of the society's terza rima contest, which I've just now finished judging.

In my hunt for terza rima exemplars, I've been poring through Dante, Shelley, Keats, Hardy, Chaucer, Carruth, Lowell, Williams, Frost, Merrill, Sexton, Auden, Plath, Bolton . . . suffice it to say that the stack of books on my study rug has become precariously tall. I haven't entirely decided which ones I'll use, but I'd like to avoid Shelley and Frost, just because they're the usual models of the form in English.

And perhaps you would like a sports update? The Harmony School co-ed baseball team ("co-ed" means that we have two girls) disguised itself as a softball team and beat the Athens all-girls softball team 36 to 12. After the first inning, our coach told all the Harmony boys to bat left-handed as a way to even up the score, which was not what happened. Everyone continued to hit enthusiastically, our star 8th grader managed to blast 3 multi-run home runs, base stealing was rampant; not to mention that the Athens coach called our left fielder an asshole because he was (with good reason) playing shallow. Altogether it was an extravagant "boys are better than girls" event, even though both our pitchers were girls and our coach was a woman.  What can I say? Of course I had to be pleased because my son's team won. Yet the ambiguities. . . .