Wrote a poem yesterday that took me about 8 hours to finish, beginning to end. It was a marathon, no doubt, but it also felt miraculous to invent and intensively revise a complete poem in more or less a single sitting. That's happened with two or three other poems, all of which I continue to like. Certainly I can't depend on it as a creation strategy, but I can't overlook the importance of staying with the intensity of a piece at the moment when I'm most excited about it.

One must find 8 empty hours, however.

By the way: as I think you'll remember, I have 2 sons, Paul and James. Paul, the younger, comes up most often in this blog because he is the literary one. But I'm all for non-literary sons as well. Just letting you know that having a fast-talking comedic 15-year-old around the house, pouncing on me and making me arm-wrestle with him, fixing the loose screw on my sunglasses, lying on the floor with the dog's head in his lap, playing Nirvana songs really loud, and walking insouciantly into the kitchen to eat out of the salad bowl with his hands is exactly what I need every single day. He just doesn't happen to care about Shakespeare.