I have been wasting time this morning scanning Virginia Woolf's letters from 1925-26 in search of learning more about her hopes and fears for the manuscript of To the Lighthouse. It seems, however, that most of her letters from that period are flirtations with Vita Sackville-West or gossips with her sister, Vanessa--interesting, of course, but not what I was looking for.

Not that it's any surprise, really, to watch a writer avoid talking about her writing.

I was looking at some of my recent poems this morning--thinking about the western Pennsylvania manuscript, thinking about the poems I've written concurrently that have nothing to do with that manuscript, thinking about how difficult it is to manage the expectations that readers have about one's writing. It is not interesting to keep writing the same kinds of poems, but so many readers are drawn to the familiarity of a style. It is not interesting to keep writing the same kinds of poems, but the experiments feel strange and unwieldy and dangerous. One reader says one thing, one says another, and in the end no one is any help at all. Nonetheless, the poems exist: sanded, polished, arranged on their rack.