Woke up to a mild rain, just what the newly planted seeds are longing for. And now I am sitting here quietly, enjoying my first weekend morning at home for a while. Midday I will need to head out for a reading, but for the moment I am unhurried and unperturbed.

Yesterday afternoon Delle, Teresa, Jeannie, and I ended up in a two-hour zoom confab that mostly centered around Anne Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay," which we'd all read beforehand and, unbeknownst to one another, all deeply disliked. So that was interesting: discovering, unexpectedly, that the four of us had meshed over a poem that is generally treated as exemplary. To me, it felt imaginatively untrustworthy, among other things. But of course I was worried about saying so, assuming that others had read it "better" than I had. It was surprisingly cathartic to discover that my admired friends also mistrusted the poem.

Otherwise, I had a plain day. I walked. I edited. I did laundry and mopped floors. I made chicken stock and then chicken and rice soup. I played cribbage and lit a fire and drank a beer and listened to a peppy baseball game. I read a history of the Comanches and I read a novel about the Maine coast. I felt sad about my neighbor, who died in his house two days ago so can no longer love the daffodils that bob brightly in his front-yard grass.

This afternoon I'll be reading at the Gibbs Memorial Library in Washington, Maine, at 3 p.m., alongside the poet and archivist Jefferson Navicky. He and I will also be carpooling together, and I'm looking forward to some conversation with him beforehand. The venue is a small library in a small town, and the reading will undoubtedly have a small audience, but what's new. Small is the story of poetry.