I came home from yesterday's poetry festival feeling like a freak. It was snowing and I had a cold, but that's no excuse. What I felt like was Lewis Carroll's Alice. Remember the part of the story when her neck grows longer and longer and twines among the trees, and pigeons peck at her and scream, "Serpent!"? Nobody screamed at me. Everyone was cordial, and I saw people there I really enjoy, people who have been my friends for years now. But still I felt like my neck was twenty feet long and I was being pecked by pigeons. I suppose what I really mean is that my writing felt freakish. There it loomed, oversized as Alice and just as awkward, needy, and ambitious, like wings of wax are ambitious, or that mechanical stretcher that pianist Robert Schumann is said to have attached to his hand--the one that was supposed to strengthen his fingers but broke them instead.