This week begins my downhill hurtle inside the snowball called 2016. On Wednesday I'll drive to Boston to teach and read at the Solstice MFA residency; and as the season advances I'll be teaching and/or reading in four New England states, flying to Los Angeles for the AWP conference, possibly taking a kid to New York City, and abetting the graduation celebrations of two sons in two different states. In between I'll be editing, playing music gigs, prepping for the Frost Place, and driving back and forth to high school.

It is tempting to imagine that I might also be writing. The two poems I finished this week were my first new work for months, and I was happy with the trajectories of both. Their genesis felt solid and interesting; the revisions were steady and self-clarifying rather than staggers into the abyss of "oh my God, this sucks." This doesn't mean that they will, in the long run, turn out to be great poems but that the process of making them pushed me to both write productively and to think productively about how I was enacting the process of writing. Writing and meta-writing, if you see what I mean.

And it is a tremendous relief to be making something new.