If you're a poet with a manuscript, you might like to know that my poetry publisher, CavanKerry Press, has announced open submission dates.

If you're a non-vegetarian cook, you might like to know that Tom and I are making Venetian meatballs for New Year's Eve.

If you're the owner of a large black poodle, you might be getting tired of frozen dead moles in your driveway.

If you've ever copied out any of John Berryman's Dream Songs, you might be wondering why half of each poem you transcribe is marvelous while the other half isn't.

If you're trying to recall what went wrong in 2010, you might have loneliness and Republicans on your list.

If you're trying to remember what went right, you might consider the words of Robert Louis Stevenson. He paints a rather human-centered vision of the world. But then again, he could hardly help being human.

No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us forever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together these scattered details for its delight.

[from the essay "Ordered South" (1874)]

I'm sending you all my love, and my best wishes for a New Year filled with scattered details for your delight.