Yesterday afternoon my publisher stopped by with ten copies of Accidental Hymn. As always, it was an exciting moment: to see the poems in their final form, to clutch the book to my heart. Given that the official pub date isn't till May, ordering info won't go up immediately. But if you happen to be interested in reviewing the collection, let me know and I'll make sure get you a copy.

The other event of yesterday was that, after all my natter about not writing, I suddenly drafted a poem. That was thanks to my friend David, who emailed me the following excerpt from Sylvia Plath's poem "Totem":

The world is blood-hot and personal
Dawn says.

This, of course, was not a prompt I could pass up, and I whipped out a draft at a speed that shocked me.

I was not exaggerating in yesterday's post when I said that writing poems has been turning on a faucet and watching them splash into the sink.

This morning I'll pull myself together for tomorrow's high school day at Monson Arts: gather up my materials, print out my syllabus, figure out what I'm going to wear. I might make a pie crust and put it into the freezer so that it's ready for my little dinner party on Saturday. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Tom, but I also don't want to disrupt his arty activities, so I won't leave here till mid-afternoon. My plan is to arrive for dinner, and then hole up in his bedroom and watch a Marlene Dietrich movie until he finishes up whatever he's doing. Then on Friday, after class, I'll zip back to Portland and leave him to his bachelorhood.

Right now, in the city, it's raining lightly. Naturally, in Monson, it's sleeting, but that's supposed to quit before long as temperatures rise. Driving should be easy enough. I'm looking forward to this dip back into the homeland, a full day with a handful of local kids, asking them to write into their relationship with the place and their place in it. Snow and mud and trees and lake. The roar of log trucks. And at night the vibrating stars.