Well, yesterday's odd little surrealist poem has taken an unexpected but welcome turn: suddenly, it has metamorphosed into a western Pennsylvania poem. All summer my western Pa. project has been singeing its hair on the back burner while I've been working on other people's manuscripts. But apparently it is not dead yet. Moreover, I've even made a breakthrough.

One of my niggling worries about the project has been how to manage the immigrant voices that are such a huge part of western Pennsylvania's coalfield history. I can't write in Polish or Italian or Czech, and I would like to avoid clumsy imitations of foreign accents. But my reading fates have managed to help me solve the problem. They told me to start reading Zbigniew Herbert in translation and Vladimir Nabokov in his strange original English. And then yesterday, as I was copying out Herbert's poem "Parable of the Russian Emigres," I realized that these were the voices I needed to probe: these voices that encapsulate English and strangeness within themselves. In other words, I don't need to imitate a Polish accent; I need to study how a Polish writer's thoughts and sentence structure interact.

What happiness to know that spending an entire day doing nothing can turn out to be something after all! I am jubilant! . . . and this despite the fact that today's "doing nothing" will be spent at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.