I've finished the first draft of part 1 of The Conversation, "Watching a Poet Make a Poem." Now I move on to to part 2, "Writing about a Poet and a Poem." This stage should move along faster because I'll be incorporating two previously written pieces into the book: an essay about William Blake that appeared in The Sewanee Review and an essay about John Milton that was included in my reader's memoir Tracing Paradise. I'll be creating a certain amount of new material, of course, as well as writing activities for S. T. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "Pale Rider." The focus of this section is writing prose about poetry, and I'll be using either long poems or, in the case of Milton, a chapter from Paradise Lost as the material under study.

In the meantime I've come to the realization that I'm very, very tired. Physically I'm perfectly well, but my brain feels like a faucet drip. The West Wind should sweep me up in his arms and carry me off to Brooklyn.