Today I'm off to Biddeford, in southern Maine, for the Poetry Out Loud southern regionals. I'll stay overnight in Portland, which means not only dinner with my friend Martha but also shopping at Micucci's Italian Grocery on Friday morning. Micucci's is one of those tiny stores where you have to wait in line at the deli counter for twenty-five minutes until finally you get accosted by a brusque clerk in a Yankees cap, but it's okay and even sort of enjoyable because you know that the salami will make everything worthwhile.

Yesterday I managed to formulate a small poem, so that was a change from my uncreative ways. It's an unhappy poem, and writing is never refreshing or therapeutic; but at least using the third person shunts me away from self-pitying dolor, which I hate. At least I found myself pulled into the words under my fingers and how they spoke to one another.

Hayden Carruth once said, "I have always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars."

Galway Kinnell, talking of Carruth's work, noted, "Writing poetry is a form of concentrated listening."

It is.