I wrote a poem yesterday. I went for a walk with my neighbor. I grubbed in the yard. I got my hair cut. I made a good slow dinner for myself: herbed lamb patties, sweet and sour peppers, wild rice, diced avocado, fresh spinach from the garden, homemade chocolate ice cream. I listened to baseball and read Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, and then I went to bed in clean air-dried sheets, in a room with the windows open.

These next two days will not have that ease. I'll be up north and back in less than 24 hours--working when I get there, working when I return . . . wish me luck because I know I'll be frayed.

But at least I pushed myself to make yesterday happen, and the poem I managed to write (if it is a poem) was absorbing and odd and I'm having a hard time tearing myself away from it.

The piece arose from a prompt I gave at the Thursday-night salon: first, the sudden invention of a name, then "talk to this person; tell them something," and a character arises in each person's notebook. Our character was Al Ackerman, and stories of Al, messages to Al, worries about Al circled the room. 

Yesterday Al floated from my notebook into a prose poem, a flash story, a meditation--it could be labeled many things. There he was, a lost being, an invention, a sorrow. Dear Al, whom I never knew: gone too soon, forgotten, remade. How stories become lives, and lives become other lives, and lies become storytelling, and storytelling becomes memory.

* * *

If you missed that epistolary workshop I did a couple of weeks ago for the Maine Poet Laureate project: apparently the recording is available here.

We've still got a few spaces left for this summer's Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Remember: you don't need to be a teacher; a number of our regulars are not. If you're looking for a collegial, welcoming, rigorous experience, open to all writers, at any level of skill, this may be just the conference for you.

And, finally, here's some of the student poems on display at the Monson Arts gallery. If you click on the photo and zoom in, you should be able to read them. I'm so proud.