Yesterday's snow, while indubitably snow, also felt like spring. It was a glittering, fat-flaked storm followed by bright blue sky and running gutters and snowballs plopping from trees. Though my son tells me it's 5 degrees in Chicago, he can't squelch my optimism. A month from now I'll be digging.

I've got a new sonnet sequence up at Split Rock Review, which you might like to read if you're in the mood for some fiction about arson. I feel itchy about calling these poems sonnets because they don't rhyme even though I know how to rhyme and often do. But the form is the form, and we can pretend the arsonist burnt off the rhymes.

So I'm off to teach poetry to kids today; I'm copyediting a new translation of the Bakkhai; I ought to wash a floor. That about sums up my rubber-band life. But as Jane Austen points out in Persuasion:

She ventured to hope that he did not always read only poetry, and to say that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Good thing I have that floor to wash.