I would do much for a full night's sleep: this wake-doze-wake-doze cycle of restlessness has gone on for way too long, and the time change is not helping.

On the bright side, it was 60 degrees when I got back to Portland late yesterday afternoon. And I had a good day with the kids . . . they came up with a batch of excellent writing prompts, had some sensible group conversation about revision, and then gamboled outside with couplets and sidewalk chalk in the thin northern sunshine. We've only got four more sessions together, and we're all starting to feel melancholy about parting.

Today I've got some classroom projects to wrap up, and then I'll be back to editing for the rest of the week. On Saturday I'll be leading a revision workshop in Dover, New Hampshire. I'm told we've got enough participants to run, but I believe there's still room for a few more poets. If you're interested, let me know and I'll send you the details. Cost is $50.

There are few other events coming up as well:

Reading in the Women Poets Series, Merrill Memorial Library, Yarmouth, ME, March 26, 7 p.m. (with the fine poets Ellen Taylor and Elizabeth Tibbetts) 

Reading with Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine's current poet laureate, Thompson Free Library, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, April 7 (time TBA, but plan on early evening) 

Keynote speaker (with former Maine poets laureate Baron Wormser and Betsy Sholl), Plunkett Poetry Festival, April 17, 7 p.m.

Of course everything could be canceled over coronavirus worries. Every day the news is worse, and William Blake's "America: A Prophecy" (1793) feels ever more terrible and true:

The mariners of Boston drop their anchors and unlade;
The scribe of Pennsylvania casts his pen upon the earth;
The builder of Virginia throws his hammer down in fear.
Then had America been lost, o’erwhelm’d by the Atlantic,
And Earth had lost another portion of the infinite,
But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging fire.
The red fires rag’d! the plagues recoil’d! then rolld they back with fury.