For the past several months my friend Teresa and I have been experimenting with a monthly book-club-for-two. We choose a poetry collection, read it separately, and then talk on the phone for an hour. The result is half-chatter/half-book discussion, and so far it's been an excellent way to make sure we stay in touch, given that she lives in Florida and I live in Maine and we never see each other.

For January we are going to read one of Ezra Pound's Cantos, which I first read with my mentor, Baron Wormser, long ago in the 1990s, when I was trying to learn how to be a poet. I struggled with the Cantos then, and I will probably still struggle with them now, and that, my friends, is my story in poetry.

At least I am dogged. Maybe that is my poetry superpower.

As the year draws to a close, I find myself considering--as I often do at these ceremonial moments of time-passage--what exactly I'm doing with my life. Cobbling together ill-paying jobs. Keeping house. Reading books. Growing vegetables.

Regarding my writing and teaching, I could purvey a summarizing sentence or two, intoned in a gloppy artist-statement sort of voice. But I won't. The fact is that I can't know. Everything I do will likely fade into the forgotten, a kind of organic breakdown into the soil of literature. Waste and failure and nourishment. Not either/or but both/and.