I'm off to Rockland today with a sheaf of judged poems for the Maine Poets Society quatrain contest. Although I'm the featured "formal poetry judge" (as opposed to my counterpart, the featured "free verse judge"), the coordinator and I decided to leave the contest rules vague. I was interested to see what people would come up with as they worked with the idea of a quatrain. Would I get a lot of exact meter and rhyme? Would I get very little of either? The result was an interesting mixture of both. And now I have to go chatter to the poets about famous quatrains I have read, quatrains I have tried to write myself, and the quatrains I discovered in their own poems.

And it is a beautiful bright-blue day for a long drive to the coast.

And my car no longer makes terrible brake noises.

And the Red Sox clinched home-field advantage in the playoffs.

And Paul spent the evening learning how to play "Knocking on Heaven's Door" on the piano.

And Ruckus the Kat has not bitten me for 24 hours.

And I have almost finished reading Bleak House for the thousandth time and still love it dearly.