Snow this morning . . . not a lot, but enough to pretty the place up. Portland has not been looking its winter best since last week's rainstorm melted the snowpack down to bare earth. I'm happy to see the white again.

I spent most of yesterday working on a new poem draft--actually a massive expansion of a draft I began last fall during my Homer seminar, but so much of it is new that the piece now feels entirely different. I think it's a good start; the poem-story is moving into interesting places, and the imagery is surprising me. One thing I've been realizing: now that I live beside the sea, I am much more affected by classical sea metaphors and references. Homer the chronicler of islands feels very close to me now, in ways that he did not when I was an inlander.

I'm getting ready to teach an advanced chapbook class this weekend, a reunion of my very first chapbook cohort from last fall, so I've been thinking a lot about the way in which a poet's geography can control a collection. My own shift from forest to city-sea is a huge part of my forthcoming book, and was likewise a huge issue while I was trying to figure out how to organize the poems. Chronology made no sense, because geography also crosses emotional time. A cow poem, such as the one I posted yesterday, which arose from my mountain childhood, is also a geography, but not a plodding straight-ahead march from there to here. Grief and memory flit, dreamlike, through a landscape of their own.

Speaking of chapbook classes: this spring I'll be leading another session of Learning from Nina Simone: An Introductory Chapbook Seminar.  This will likely be the last time I'll run the class this year, and it's already half full, so if you're interested, please reach out ASAP. You don't need to be a published poet; all you need is a sheaf of close-to-finished pieces that you're beginning to treat as a unified group . . . or that somehow don't seem to go together . . . but then again maybe they do, and you're puzzled and curious, and want to start figuring them out. My approach is not to tell you the answer (news flash: there isn't one single answer) but to give you some tools for experimentation and introduce you to a supportive and attentive group of colleagues focused on the same task. Low stress, deep engagement. That's my goal.