Saturday morning after snow. The plows and shovels have done their work: the sleek Currier and Ives scene is now a lumpy moonscape scarred with salt. Still, the view is charming in its own way. Each house has its personal mouse trail--driveway, walkways--scratched out of the snow. Yesterday, even before daylight, the neighborhood children were trudging up and down the street, licking powder off their mittens. This pack is devoted to weather, and they spent the bulk of their free day shrieking and thumping and dragging around shovels for non-useful purposes. No doubt they'll be out there again today, burrowing into plow mountains and hollering arcane and cryptic orders at one another.

This is my last free weekend before I climb onto the teaching train again. I'm not full of plans, but I'll figure out something to keep myself busy. I've been thinking so hard about class prep lately that I'm eager to return to my messy private ways. The subject of my next teaching session is wildness: where does a new manuscript leap into wildness and risk? where does it revert to tameness or timidity? what part does desire play in a manuscript? does the poet embrace desire or repress it? what is the urgency in this manuscript? does that sense of urgency reach out to a potential reader? Last Wednesday I was talking to my Monson kids about embracing risk--about how scared I am when it comes to, say, driving over big highway bridges, yet in my writing I'm thrilled to throw myself recklessly off any cliff. Lots of people, even ones who are good writers, are not so easy about wild abandon. They button up their work, box it neatly, detour away from direct contact with ecstasy or deep pain. Facing wildness, embracing wildness, hunting down wildness . . . this is tremendously difficult for them.

I'm not being judgmental here, simply noting that what is easy for one person is nearly impossible for another person. But as a teacher of poetry--as an editor, an observer, a reader, a participant--I also recognize that wildness lies at the heart of the best work. Across centuries, across styles, across fads and fashions, poems that tap into the ecstatic are the poems that continue to flame. I guess this is why I distrust words like balance in discussions of manuscript organization. Balance is tame. Balance is safe. Balance is static. What happens to a poem or a collection if you radically un-balance? If you actually say what you want. Not what you should want. Not what a nice moral person wants for society. What you want. You.