Island weather this morning--dark and foggy and humid, with a briny scent to the air. It's the last day of July, and the days are getting notably shorter . . . dim sunless daybreaks and the dark creeping in earlier each evening. And yet it's high summer. The garden is in its glory--a riot of sunflowers, zinnias, nasturtiums, scarlet runners. The two rose of Sharons along the sidewalk are a mass of white and lavender flowers. Tomato vines are loaded, blueberries are ripening fast, green beans dangle from the trellis, basil and dill and cilantro spill from their beds.

So far this has been a busy week of meetings and planning sessions and phone calls and drafting schedules and sending out emails, but today will be quieter. I'll get onto my mat this morning, and then I hope to have a reading and writing day. There's still that compost pile to move, but it's sodden with rainwater, so my enthusiasm is low. I need to prune and tie up the sprawling tomatoes. I ought to harvest herbs for drying. But mostly I just need to wallow around in words. I'm still reading Dickens, still pondering "Grecian Urn," getting ready to start Donna Stonecipher's prose-poem collection The Ruins of Nostalgia. That's more than a day's work right there.

Yesterday, out of the blue, my older son phoned and announced that he and his partner would be spending a night with us on their way to a get-together with friends in New Hampshire. I was working in Monson during his last visit East, so I am all of aflutter about this unexpected visit. Boy time awaits! Next weekend I'll see my younger son in Vermont; a few days later my older son will be here; and then I'll have another round with the younger in Brooklyn in early September. A Sox-Mets game together in Queens: what a grand way to finish out the summer.

Yesterday was a whirlwind, but the chores all got done . . . first, a long walk, then floors and bathrooms cleaned, sheets and towels washed, groceries dealt with, appointments made. In the midst was a long midday phone meeting with Teresa about plans for next year's conference. We've got ideas for a few structural adjustments, but we also spent a good deal of time talking about how best to maintain the atmosphere of giddy, engaged, close-knit learning that was so clearly evident this past July. Our minds are running down strange and intriguing paths. We're feeling so much freedom and possibility; and given that we both love experiment, this sense of openness is very exciting. As a participant pointed out, even the shift in the conference name--from the Conference on Poetry and Teaching to the Conference on Poetry and Learning--hints at a change in perspective. Learning is not about purveying information. Learning is about discovery. How can poetry be a window into, say, a deep, productive engagement with other art forms? With science? With the natural world? How could this conference promote such engagements?

You see that my thoughts are spinning. I'm certainly not articulate yet, but I'm beginning to have some ideas. . . .

This morning, another meeting--this one about a September team-teaching workshop with my friend Gretchen. And then back to my desk to work up a draft conference schedule for Teresa and deal with various other this-and-thats. Maybe eventually I'll get outside and haul a few more loads of leaf compost, if we don't have another weird un-forecasted drizzle day like we did yesterday.

In the meantime, I've started rereading Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. It's such a delight.

Back to Monday and back to busyness. This will be a week of meetings, of a new editing project, of hammering out my high school teaching schedule. Today I've got housework to do, sheets and towels to wash, groceries to buy, an early-morning walk with a friend, a big midday meeting with Teresa to go over evaluations and start planning for next year's conference.

Yesterday was busy too, though in a different way. First, T and I walked along Back Cove. Then, after I did the yard trimming, I started moving last fall's leaf compost up to the top section of the Hill Country, which is presently a thin square of weedy grass edged with a few plantings. Every year I do something big with my leaf-mulch treasure, and the weedy patch is this season's recipient. With the rough mulch as a base, it will become a new perennial bed. The work is heavy, sweaty, and slow--lots of shoveling and pitchforking and wheelbarrow trundling--and I won't get the job done quickly. But I'm glad to have it underway.

In the afternoon, I cleaned myself up, and T and I went into town for lunch, a visit to the museum, and a trip to the fish market, where we bought two cooked lobsters, a baguette, and a slab of bluefish. T was in the mood for lobster-roll night, so I mixed up some mayonnaise and made a tomato salad, and we each picked and dressed our own sandwiches. And then we ate outside in the gloaming--a classic summertime feast under the evening sky.

No poem writing, hardly any book reading. It was a day off from work, I guess. [Okay, I admit I did look at art.]

Tom's out again early with his camera, and I am up again early with coffee and my letter to you. The weather has been lovely for the past couple of days--sunny and warm, breezy and not too humid, though there's a bit of a haze from the Canadian fires. I spent much of yesterday working on a poem, with small breaks to stake my pepper plants, replace a part in the broken string trimmer, and set up a new external hard drive for my laptop. By the end of the day I was feeling downright handy.

Today I should probably use that string trimmer, and also do some weeding in the Hill Country between the driveways, and start moving my big composted leaf pile, and maybe harvest some dill for drying. T and I are talking about going into town to see the Passamaquoddy basket artist Jeremy Frey's show at the Portland Museum of Art. I might stop in at the fish market, I might mess around with my poem draft some more, I might take a walk along the bay . . . it's peaceful to have no solid plans.

Lately I've been thinking again about that word balance. I know I've argued here in the past against the way in which people tend to snatch at this notion when they're feeling overwhelmed in their daily lives. Often, I think, the lament for balance is code for yearning. It is a sign of lack, a signal that people are not able, for whatever reason, to demand the time they need to focus on making.

But balance is bad for art. At Monson Maudelle gave a stellar presentation about the way in which sonic balance actively dulls both individual poems and collections. Teresa likewise offered prompts that demonstrated how important it is to break formal patterns, to create friction.

I grew up in an atmosphere of extreme duty, in which being uncomfortable, unsatisfied, self-denying always trumped joy. To make art, I had to go rogue . . . but first I had to learn to rebel. That education has taken decades, and I have needed all the help I could get--from Tom, from my mentor Baron Wormser, from friends, from my sons, from books, from the ideas I began to explore in my teaching.

All of this learning was friction. It rubbed away at the received notion that service to others required negation of self.

And now that I am almost 60 years old, I see that my life has not been balanced at all. It has been a lurch; it has been a spinning carnival ride; it has been leaning out too far over the edge to snatch at the gold ring that will always be out of reach.

My older son turns 30 today, an amazement and a delight and an oh-my-god-how-did-we-all-get-here-in-one-piece celebration. There was no balance in our household. There was high emotion and "Don't bother me; I'm reading" and mining each other for material and rushing off into the woods and building rickety forts stuck together with tape and twine.

Private life and household life, a family obsession with story and structure and comedy and tragedy and with making things . . . everyone was always making things and most of the time the things we made fell down, fell apart, turned into something strange, got lost among the trees. We had no balance but we staggered on.

I don't have any advice for anyone--except to say that staggering isn't necessarily a mistake. Neither is rushing off into the woods. What would have been a mistake? Rocking gently in easy waters, never tipping too far to one side or the other.

Balance would have lulled me to death. It would have killed me.

At daybreak Tom was up and out of the house in a whirl, off to take pictures in the early morning light, so I sit here alone with a pot of coffee, listening to the chip-chip of an annoyed squirrel in the ash tree and idly wondering what I will do with myself on this Saturday. Yard work, I suppose, but I am open to distractions, should any amble along.

Yesterday afternoon Teresa, Jeannie, and I had another of our Poetry Lab confabs--our monthly zoom chatters about whatever might arise from what we've been reading or hearing or doing or musing over. I do love these visits. Those two are so smart. Just listening their minds ping from one flash to the next makes me proud to know them. And I feel we are good for each other . . . or at least they are good for me. The ideas they raise, the paths they rush down--often these are places I had not thought of venturing. I come away from our meetings amazed, untethered, dizzy.

For much of this summer I have existed--very temporarily, I know this--in an extraordinary bubble that I can only call paradise . . . and how that can be true, given the chaos of our public institutions, is beyond my understanding. I have been writing new work that excites me, I have been preparing a book for publication, I have been surrounded by poets I admire and look up to and who treat me as a peer, I have spent a week trying to create a dreamworld of poetry for other people to bask in, I have been madly in love, my garden is flourishing, my house is bright, my stove simmers, I am reading and reading and reading and reading, and walking and walking and walking.

I want to weep with gratitude. I know this moment will end and I will tumble into the dust. But just to have been given it, to have received it into myself . . . all I can say is that the gods are generous and they are terrible, and most of all they are inscrutable.

Yesterday I posted a new Poetry Kitchen class, this one on revision, a subject I've actively been rethinking and trialing in my work at Monson Arts. The usual revision-teaching approach is the workshop model, in which participants share new work that the teacher and classmates then critique. I call this the Joan-of-Arc-tied-to-a-stake model of revision teaching. The class flings advice, and the poet silently endures the assault.

There are numerous problems with this approach. Even if we set aside the poet's feelings of anxiety and fear and stupidity (and why should we set them aside? why should anyone have to be hazed like this?), we end up with a teaching model that depends on sorting through a barrage of exterior advice rather than one that enhances the poet's ability to see and judge their own work clearly and vigorously. If we want to teach poets to become confident, independent, and clear-sighted, the workshop model is clearly an inadequate method for doing so.

Plus, I hate it. I hate being the flinger of advice. I hate having advice flung at me. Why should I reinforce this terrible pattern in my classes or my own writing life?

During last year's high school sessions at Monson Arts, I experimented with some new ways of teaching revision, and at the Conference on Poetry and Learning I shared them with the participants, using experiential activities so that we all got to feel the difference in approach. Afterward Teresa said, "You should start offering plain old revision classes to practicing poets via this model." And so, voila, I have created a new Poetry Kitchen session that does exactly that.

"Revision Intensive: Trusting Yourself" is a two-day class, held November 9 and 10 on Zoom, that centers around my belief that we need to intensify our own engagement with our in-process poems rather than rely primarily on the external advice of instructors or classmates. While a supportive community can be wonderfully uplifting, in the end we each need to depend on our own instincts, our own engagement with the art and our material.

Via a series of exercises, discussions, and writing prompts, the class will focus on showing participants how to see their poems-in-progress clearly and usefully. It will help them learn to trust their ability to make exciting and productive decisions about revision and to distinguish between useful suggestions and destructive ones. The goal is to give participants the skills and confidence to move their poems forward into new forms.

This approach was spectacularly successful in the classroom last year, and it was also well received at the conference. It is, essentially, exactly how I approach revision in my own poems. Merely, I figured out a way to frame it for sharing. A note: Even if you attended the conference, this class might be useful for you as it will be focusing directly on you and your poems, not you as a teacher or a purveyor of poetry. This is a class for writers-in-progress.

FYI, at the moment there's still plenty of space in the class, but my October Poetry Kitchen offering is now completely full. So you might want to snag a spot soon, if you're interested. The cost is $150.

Rain again this morning, and in the wet darkness a Carolina wren urges tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle, tea. I didn't sleep very well last night, and this morning I'm not bleary exactly but a bit brittle.

I spent much of yesterday drafting an essay I don't like, one that I'll probably abandon on account of its dull thinking but that, subject-wise, is still niggling at me. I never know if these false leads are useful or a waste of time. And I write so few essays these days that prose-work itself is mystifying. I can't call the day a failure, given that I cranked out a lot of sentences, but it wasn't a transcendent one by any means. I wrote an awkward draft about an awkward topic, and I never found the portal.

On the bright side I did get rid of the weird smell in the dishwasher.

Today I'll bake a peach cobbler, and I'll walk down to the farmers' market in search of new potatoes, and in the evening I'll go out to my poetry group. Maybe that essay will decide to be written; but, if so, it will have to do a lot of nagging to make me take it seriously.

I'm still poring over "Grecian Urn," though, and I've been thinking about Hopkins's notions of inscape and instress. In an article in Commonweal, Anthony Domestico explains:

Hopkins coined the terms inscape and instress to describe the overflowing presence of the divine within the temporal. Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being; instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink.

I feel these distinctions more than I understand them intellectually, perhaps because, for me, they are elements of the process of moving from inarticulate sensation into the framing of language. I daresay they also have some connection to why I'm presently writing good poems and bad prose.

I worked in my study all morning and then, around noon, ventured out to Target to look for new pillowcases (ours are suddenly disintegrating). For some reason, the place was packed with Canadians--Quebecois license plates everywhere, hundreds of vacationing families chattering in French . . . I wondered if I'd accidentally crossed an international border instead of driven 15 minutes to South Portland. It was all very surprising but exciting, too, and I came home with my pillowcases feeling as if I'd been on a small adventure by accident, though nothing had actually happened except for being surrounded by a language I understand only haltingly.

It's all ear work, though . . . poetry all morning, singing along to my favorite playlist in the car, and then standing in line behind the inscrutable grievances of French-speaking children. "Tout le monde [something or other]!" one teenager kept admonishing her father. "Tout le monde!" And he, avoiding her eye, stared down into his cart, which contained twelve half gallons of bottled water and nothing else.

I woke this morning to another small spat of rain, but it seems to have stopped now. We got more than an inch yesterday--very good news for the garden--and I think the day will be fairly cool. Maybe today will be the day I wear a long-sleeved shirt for the first time in weeks. I should do some weeding in the beds along the lane, pull out bolting lettuce and arugula, sow another round of salad greens. I've got more work to do on the sheaf of poems I've been combing through, more notes to jot down about "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (which I've now copied out three times, and will probably copy out a few more times before Teresa and I meet . . . oh, what I'm learning about repetition and metrical disruption! This poem is a master class in sound.)

A light rain is pattering down, and the air is thick with damp. I am hoping for a long day of showers. Southern Maine has had very little moisture lately, and my gardens are thirsty.

Yesterday was crammed with chores and obligations, but today will be quieter--exercising on my mat and then poem revision and poem study in the morning; probably running an errand or so in the afternoon. I'm still waiting for the next big editing project to arrive; when it does, my days will realign around it. But for the moment my time is my own, and my brain is full of poetry. 

It feels good to step into a writing day with the house scrubbed and tidy, towels and sheets freshly laundered, gardens thriving and bright, and a soft rain tapping at the windows. The house is my canvas, the house is my muse: this was true in the woods, and now it's true by the sea. All of my work as a maker arises from the small spaciousness of home.

Now the rain is falling harder. The kitchen clock ticks, and lamps glow in the weak daylight.

I am a poet and I write poems. That may sound like an obvious statement, but of course all of you writers know that such statements are fraught with fear and wistfulness, hope and procrastination, wrong-headed bumbling and self-destructive showmanship . . . to name merely a few of the abstractions lurking inside our Pandora's box.

I think my house helps me write because it soothes my senses. I love the yellow paint on the dining-room wall, the blue chairs in my study. I love the bindings of the books, the well-dusted corners of the wooden floors, the plumped-up cushions on the shabby couch. I love the bright glass window of the wood stove, the hum of the washing machine in the basement, the scent of sourdough rising in a red bowl, the single coral-colored blossom poised in a pale blue bottle. Nothing is grand. But my body reaches out to these small pleasures; they make me attend, they make me listen to the cadence of my thoughts. And the cadence is where the poems begin.

Weeks have elapsed since I've worn anything long-sleeved, but this morning I am considering the possibility. The air is downright cool--the first time it's been in the 50s since my return from Monson. The neighborhood is extremely quiet, no hint yet of Monday bustle, other than the crows yawping in the maples.

I have a long list of this-n-thats to deal with today . . . watering the garden, an early morning walk with a friend, a wrestle with an editing project, then mopping and vacuuming, washing sheets and towels, grocery-shopping, mailing a birthday package to my son, and so on and so forth.

But at least I caught up on a lot of yard work yesterday--all of the mowing, most of the trimming (until the trimmer died), deep weeding of the back gardens while T chain-sawed up the pile of deadwood the arborist left us. And I caught up with Keats also--a first pass through "Grecian Urn," which I'll probably copy out at least twice more to really pull myself into it.

I am still not reading the news, but it finds me nonetheless, spreading like a virus.

The nights have been cooler, no air machine roaring, and now, in the gray first light, a vague breeze trembles through the open windows. I'm glad to report that I slept better this morning--not late by any means but at least I wasn't awake before 4 a.m. I feel rested, happy to be drinking my small cup of coffee, comfortable in my skin.

I spent the first third of yesterday's daylight in the garden, weeding all of the front beds, pruning out overgrown herbs, deadheading blossoms, watering. Then I scrubbed the dirt off myself and turned to the big bread-making project that's been absorbing my attention this week: a five-day-long Danish rye extravaganza involving a buttermilk and rye starter that ferments for 72 hours, staggered additions of raw rye kernels, more overnight fermentations, and, today, a very slow rise and bake. There's no kneading involved, just a giant bowl of fragrant, bubbling batter. I'm quite excited about it.

To celebrate our anniversary, T and I decided to go into town and wander among the vintage stores--ostensibly to find a little birthday tchotchke to mail to our son but mostly because we enjoy poking through other people's weird stuff. We ate a big late lunch at Empire Chinese, came home for a nap, and then puttered around the house for the rest of the evening. It was a pleasant, unfussy day.

This morning I'll do more outside work before the heat kicks back in--mowing and trimming, some backyard weeding. I'll get the mysterious and exciting rye bread into the oven. Maybe I'll grocery-shop, or maybe I'll procrastinate on that till tomorrow.

In the meantime, Teresa and I have decided to take a detour before we hurl ourselves back into the 17th-century poets: we're going to veer into the romantics and undertake Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." My plan is to copy out the poem word for word, and I am itching to get started. All of that factual Danish-rye talk might as well be a metaphor for my life in poetry during the past couple of weeks. Fermentation is underway and I am bubbling over.

 It is Saturday at 4:30 a.m.-- not much daylight yet, but the birds are singing hard, and I am trying to enjoy them. I'm up early because I had a vivid dream about my friend Jilline. Though she has been dead for nearly 20 years, she regularly haunts me; and last night's dream was wrenching in its simplicity . . . walking together down a New York City street, as we did so often in real life; idle talk about clothes; the plainness of our bond, none of the "how I long to be an artist" emoting that we also did so often in real life . . . this time just two friends in their summer dresses, window-shopping.

Today is my 33rd wedding anniversary, and perhaps that's why Jilline was visiting me again. On the hot morning that Tom and I got married, she rose from her seat, statuesque and hilarious in the prim confines of that old Friends meetinghouse. She winked at me from across the room, then read a passage from Paradise Lost, complex and gorgeous and heartfelt but also a private joke between us, given my not-yet-come-to-terms-with-Milton crabbiness in those days. She teased my dad at the reception, and they kept slipping ice cubes down one another's collar. Years tumbled by and she sat with me beside a lake with my firstborn son and told me that my new baby looked like Edward G. Robinson. She stood at the rail of a New York ferry and pointed out the Statue of Liberty to my secondborn son. Later, in his excitement, he drew a map of the city in which Jilline loomed just as tall as the Lady with the Lamp. She wandered the Roman ghetto with me and she wise-cracked with Italian guys in her New Jersey mobster accent and she worshipped with me at the tomb of Keats. She wrote me letter upon letter upon letter, none of which I've been able to bring myself to reread. And then, quite suddenly, she was dead.

I didn't expect to enter today with such a burst of melancholy. Yet despite the sadness, I am always glad to meet Jilline in my dreams. She was the friend who taught me to see my desperate need to make art as part of the comedy of being human. She showed me how to work, and she made me understand that being an artist means being alive in the moment . . . and then she died.

Yet the alive stays alive in her hauntings. Today I have been married for 33 years. Jilline, if she were in the world, would be on the phone, singing some goofy 1950s nightclub song to us. A dress would arrive in the mail--a bargain from T. J. Maxx that she has decided will look perfect on me. She appears without warning, rushes through the door in a cloud of cheap tulle, leaving lipstick stains on Tom, declaiming Shakespeare, carrying on, making a scene, hogging the spotlight, loving us madly.

When you live long enough, your ghosts start throwing their own parties. And you have to go. You can't decide to stay home and turn in early, even though you know the ghosts will make you stay up all night and someone downstairs will call the cops on account of the noise.

Afterward, sleepless, you wander home through the grimy eloquent streets. An early-morning train squeals its brakes, and a pair of pigeons flutters up from their roost on a fire escape. The air smells of grit and all-night diners, and the soles of your shoes echo on the pavement.

I spent much of yesterday back in the teaching saddle, not running a class but inventing one: the first Poetry Kitchen offering of the 2024-25 season. Held on an October Saturday on zoom, it will be an all-day generative-writing class based around some of Keats's ideas about poetry--lots of conversation about the work of a variety of poets, lots of writing time. If you're interested, you should register pronto because, believe it or not, it's already more than half full. That might be because it only costs $75; I am trying to keep these things affordable.

I'll slowly be posting more class offerings as I work out my school-year schedule. It's a challenge to balance my weekday travel to Monson with these weekend-based classes, my bottomless stack of freelance editorial projects, family obligations, and my sanity and exhaustion. I'm thrilled that the zoom classes have become so popular, but I overbooked myself ridiculously last year, and I've got to figure out how to do better.

This morning I'll be meeting with the Monson Arts director about scheduling next year's Conference on Poetry and Learning. It seems that the staff was thrilled with our presence, which makes me so happy, and the participant evaluations I've received have also been enthusiastic. After years of instability and anxiety, we've finally found our footing again. It is a great relief.

As is the weather. Finally the heat has broken. Though we could use a good steady rain, coolness is better than scorch, and the garden is grateful for what it can get. Today I'll do some watering, do some weeding, tie up the burgeoning tomatoes, harvest sage for drying. And I hope I'll get back to poems as well. At last night's salon, three more promising blurts erupted in my notebook. Clearly I'm in the zone and I need to stay there if I can.

In the space of two days I've honed six poem drafts nearly to completion. This feels stunning to me, not least because doing that work was not especially difficult. I saw what the drafts were and what needed to happen quickly and clearly--in stark contrast to the long poem I've been working on since May, which has undergone a series of massive changes and still feels gluey, as if another massive change is inevitable.

Meanwhile, I've been reading two novels that I often fall back on when my making brain is overcharged: Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon. They are mysteries, but the plot is not the attraction. What draws me is the love affair between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. I first read these novels as a teenager, in the days when most any love-affair description was a lure. But I continue to find this particular relationship exciting and satisfying. It is an attraction of both mind and body, and that combination still draws me like a moth.

Neither character is very young. Neither is virginal. Both are fearsomely well educated. They easily quote Donne and Keats and Shakespeare from memory, and they tend to read tomes such as Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici while idling in river boats. Despite their intellect--because of their intellect--they are fired with physical desire for one another. There is no actual sex scene in these novels, but that hardly matters. Skin and breath and the set of a pair of shoulders become the erotic emblems of their twined thought. As Harriet pauses, in the moment before she accepts Peter's proposal of marriage, he gravely calls her magistra . . . mistress of arts, her title as a scholar. It is a tender, eloquent, and also steamy moment, though neither character has as yet embraced the other.

Sayers wanted to create romantic leads who were one another's equals, and in Gaudy Night, published in 1936, set in a women's college at Oxford, with a plot that explicitly centers around the "problem" of women's education and the rise of Hitlerian ideas about women's place in the polity (with a glance at eugenics and other contemporaneous horrors), this choice feels radical. Her earlier Lord Peter novels are more trivial--he is merely a titled ass-around-town who happens to love solving crimes. But in Gaudy Night and the follow-up Busman's Honeymoon, both the characters and the plots thicken into a larger consideration of what a marriage of equals might entail. Even as a young person I found this irresistible. And today, when I am immersed in making poems, I find myself turning to these novels as a rest and an encouragement.

Because to think is to feel. Of course it is. Of course.

Yesterday morning I transcribed, rewrote, revised, and refined four poems . . . four! . . . all from blurts I'd scrawled in Monson in response to prompts from Teresa, Maudelle, and myself. Clearly it was a brain-on-fire week in more ways than one. No wonder I'm still wandering around in a daze and sleeping like I've been blackjacked.

Supposedly the torrid weather will break tonight or tomorrow, which will be a relief. But my extreme-heat behavior does bear a certain resemblance to how I act when I'm holed up in the house during a long blizzard. Reading, writing, and cooking become the pivot of my days. Yesterday, as the temperature climbed into the 90s, I finished (mostly) four new poems.  I gorged on a Dorothy Sayers mystery novel. I baked a loaf of Swedish rye. I made a batch of peach frozen yogurt. I made cold sesame-peanut noodles. I made a watermelon salad. I made three quarts of ice tea. I pondered the early trajectory of Keats. In a blizzard all of that food would be stews and cakes, but you get the picture.

Today will likely be more of the same . . . this time with lime-marinated chicken instead of noodles, a new batch of blurts to transcribe, another weatherbeaten Sayers mystery pulled off the shelf, and the constant miracle of Keats. Why mess with a winning formula?

Of course laundry is never-ending; I'll need to pick blueberries early before the scorch sets in; I may run an errand or two; I have to get some sort of exercise, either on foot or on my mat; and I have doubts about that rye loaf. Still, this week of heat has helped me settle fully into my writing, without the distractions of got-to-weed-the-gardens, etcetera.

I love to write at home. That is always, always where the real work happens. So uncovering such rich yeasty starter material has been an enormous boon.

At 5 a.m. I let the cat out into a spattering of rain, faint relief after a hot and sticky night. Yesterday morning the temperature had cooled off enough for me to open the house windows for an hour or two and release our ears from the constant roar of the fans. Today I won't bother: the air outside is like a wet wool blanket.

We bought our air conditioner just after the pandemic, when I needed to spend days on zoom in my tiny hot upstairs study. I'd never lived inside an air-machine bubble before, and though I still don't like it, I'm grateful for it. This weather is a terrible strain: I struggle to get anything done in such heat, yet my body yearns to be outside--digging, weeding, mowing, just being in the world. Yesterday I cleaned the house, which was at least active, and today I'll try to go for a walk before the heat starting spiking again. But I'm missing that Monson lake--paradise for hot and restless skin.

Today my plan is to write. I've got a notebook filled with blurts that I want to play with. I've got Bate's biography of Keats niggling at my thoughts. I've got time and solitude . . . the house is clean, the laundry is under control, the groceries are shelved, the new editing project has yet to arrive, I can't work outside, so I might as well spend the day with words.

 Briefly, the air machine has hushed and the windows are open. Outside, the stillness of early morning: a snatch of birdsong, a distant train whistle.

The weekend, though miserably hot, was sweet. T and I went into town for oysters, and then dawdled in a pop-up store devoted to cookbooks--early editions, arcana and oddities (as in How to Cook a Slug), a number of featured collections that we already own and use regularly which made us feel smug, and several that we longed to own. I treated myself to an encyclopedic volume titled The Nordic Baking Book, which is filled with recipes for Scandinavian breads, porridges, pancakes, and buns, along with the histories of regional flour preferences, baking and leavening styles (Icelanders like to bake in volcanoes, apparently), and rumors (was bread ever rolled in sawdust before cooking? the author is unsure). Meanwhile, Tom fidgeted over a tome on fermentation, but restrained himself, at least temporarily.

Al fresco dinner was green bean and lettuce salad, cold escarole and rice soup, and a duck banh mi we brought home as a treat. The Sox roared happily into the All Star break. We ate lemon custard with blueberries for dessert. I finished the novel I was reading. We had a cheerful day together, and now it is Monday.

Slowly I am reacquainting myself with my duties. Today I'll return to my exercise regimen. I'll do some planting. I'll do some housework. I'll alert the press I work for that I'm ready to take on another copyediting project. I'll schedule an upcoming class. I'll read conference evaluations. I'll grocery-shop. I'll try out a recipe from the new cookbook.

I still feel the aftereffects of a long intense week of poetry immersion: still unsure of my footing in the regular world, a bit convalescent. But I am glad to be home . . . to be welcomed home.

Daily temperatures this coming week are supposed to reach 88, 88, 90, 88. No break till Thursday . . . if you can call a high of 83 a cool spell. The air machine is roaring 24 hours a day, and even Tom, derider of air conditioning, is not complaining.

The only gentle moments are the early mornings, and shortly I'll get dressed and go outside and do some mild gardening. I want to pull out the bolted cilantro, harvest the rest of the escarole, sow a few new rows of this and that. This time of year the succession crops grow so quickly: seeds seem to sprout within hours.

Last night I made macaroni salad with a half-pound of cavatappi pasta, a can of tuna, some chopped fennel seedlings, a red onion, a couple of cucumbers, homemade mayonnaise, and a fistful of cilantro and Thai basil. Today I'll make rice and escarole soup, pureed and chilled and floating with cucumbers, dill, and lemon.

Maudelle left on their travels yesterday mid-morning, and I spent much of the rest of the day loafing, though I did wash bedding and make a meal. T went off to the photo co-op for a few hours to scan some photo negatives, which meant that I was completely alone (when awake) for the first time in more than a week. The solitude was restorative. Today I feel much more energetic . . . ready to walk and talk and do my jobs, though I still don't want to attempt to teach anybody how to do anything.

For several weeks now I've completely halted my news-scrolling. Of course the news leaks in anyway, but I am not perseverating, I am not constantly checking in, I am not listening to pundits rehash and speculate and terrify. Thank goodness I made that move. I don't know how I'd be managing otherwise. What I'm realizing is that knowing enough is a far different thing from over-saturation. It is the over-saturation that creates the spiraling anxiety. And that sort of anxiety is destructive, paralyzing, useless.

How to stay sane in America, if you're Dawn: (1) Break your caffeine dependency. (2) Don't watch/read/scroll the news more than once a day, and even then be quick about it. (3) Garden and cook and read and write poems and canoodle with your boyfriend. (4) Listen to baseball on the radio. (5) Engage your body in the world. (6) Sleep.

A participant friend just emailed this photo of Teresa and me in downtown Monson, out on our morning walk before breakfast. The photo makes me happy and sad. For a week we were together every day, from morning till night. And now we won't lay eyes on each other for a year.

But I think our goofy smiles do capture something that happened over the week . . . the complete ease of being in this place, the excitement of doing our work together.

With Maudelle still in my house I haven't yet fully detached from the conference. Yesterday I took them out and about into Portland. We drove to Tom's work site and toured the seaside-palace-in-progress. We ogled a lighthouse and met some conference participants for a diner lunch. But by the time we got back home, both of us were exhausted. I fell asleep on the couch and slept so hard that when Tom walked in after work I was shocked. Looking down at me goggling up at him, he said, "I guess you've hit a wall." I guess I have. Thank goodness he grilled the steak for dinner, he washed the dishes, he talked and entertained. I managed the around-the-edges hostess acts, but, lordy, how the tired has crept up on me.

Delle will head out onto their travels this morning, and I will try to relax into some sort of quiet. I have a million household and garden tasks to catch up on, but I have no idea what I'll actually be able to do, given my sagging energy and the extreme heat. I haven't unpacked the bulk of my luggage yet. T and I haven't really been alone together. 

Just now an insubstantial rain is falling. Though Monson was nailed by five inches of rain a few nights ago, Portland didn't get a drop. The soil is dry. We need water, and the forecast is torrid. It is unlike me to keep the air conditioner going 24 hours a day. But even with the machine roaring away, nights are sticky in this house.

I will try to do some mowing early in the day. The weeds aren't too terrible, yet. But if I can't get anything done, I can't get anything done. I am not going berate myself. 

I dropped John and Teresa at their hotel, and swung into the driveway at about 6 p.m. to discover my beloved in the front yard picking blueberries. What a welcome sight. Our reunion was a flurry because we immediately had to whip on our entertaining hats. I ordered pizza, T made a salad, and before long John and Teresa arrived via Uber, Maudelle pulled in with her truck, and we settled into the warm backyard for pizza and drinks and a final meal together.

And now this morning J & T are at the airport waiting for their flight south, M is asleep in my spare room, Tom is convincing himself to get out of bed and dress for work, and I am back in my old couch corner writing to you.

I'm tired but I'm not you-can-mop-the-floor-with-me tired, and that in itself is a giant difference from previous years. Monson Arts took such amazing care of us. I had no worries beyond the boundaries of the program. None. No fuss about whether the electricity or the water or the toilets were working. No fret about meals or mold. No driving madly from one place to another. The place was beautiful and easeful. In previous years I spent so much time trying make sure that the participants found repose that I never found repose myself. I feel restored, not wrecked.

Today I slip myself back into daily things . . . hauling trash to the curb, hanging clothes on the line. M may stay here for a day or two, so we'll be spending time together, but I know that both of us will also be starting to catch up on our solitude. The week in Monson was intensely, wonderfully social, but aloneness is my usual medium.

Before we left, the director at Monson Arts told Teresa, "Next year is a done deal. You'll be here." The conference has a new home--a home that wants my program, that welcomes my program, that embraces my program. I am so, so happy about this. Last year at this time I feared we might be done for. This year I know we have a lively, loving future.

Slowly the rain rolled in . . . a few fat drops in the afternoon, then downpours in early evening, then crashing storms at night, pounding the metal roof of my cabin, rivers of rain crashing, thundering.

Now, in the early morning, wildness has subsided to a gentle hiss. Drops patter into lake, tap-tap on deck and deck chairs. The grey scent of stone rises through open windows.

Today is my last morning in this watery place. Already the ribbon has loosened; already a few participants have vanished back into the world, and those who remain have shifted into a new sort of attention.

Teresa's homework prompt was to invent a form. She gave each of us one of four form names--puddle, thunder, twilight, porcupine. I got puddle, and so I stayed up late last night and got up early this morning to wrestle with what puddle might imply in a poetic shape. It's been a difficult and absorbing task.

We have a full day of teaching ahead, and then mid-afternoon the drive back to Portland, a pizza night with faculty, reunion with Tom and my cat and my garden and my bed. Still, though it's time, I am reluctant to break the spell.

A few people missing are from the photo, but here are most of us on the porch, getting set for last night's participant reading . . . which was magnificent. It was a giddy night, as reading nights should be, and after an afternoon downpour, we were able to set the lectern up so each reader could gaze straight into the lake, with its sunset colors just beginning to cluster among the tree shadows, with the kingfishers flying and the loons diving and the battered clouds unrolling across the sky like fish scales.

Today is the last day of the conference proper. At noon we'll say farewell to a few pals, and then we'll move forward into the writing retreat--a day and half devoted entirely to reading, writing, and experiment.

I am tired, but I am not exhausted, not wrung out. Though I've been working nonstop and not sleeping all that well, this place has been an embrace. No rushing around, no fixing anything, no panic. The exterior comforts--good bed, good food, good lake--have been remarkable.

On the far side of the lake, the low curve of the Appalachians rises into view. Stride left and grapple with the Hundred Mile Wilderness and the daunting double crest of Katahdin. Stride right and the White Mountains hoist themselves into the clouds. The Great North Woods cradles us in this small bowl of lake and village.

I am so grateful to be here.

 

Summer in all of its glory . . . cloud fingers stretching into the blue, morning air cool over my bare shoulders, the heat of the day still coiled in its bed.

I slept well last night, which is a relief as I was nearly flattened by my own reading--in a good way, because I think I read well. But I felt like I'd run a long race--I'd inhaled my performance intensity, if you know what I mean, and my nerves were a-quiver afterward and all I wanted to do was sit on a couch and stared wide-eyed/wild-eyed at the horizon.

And today I'm back on the stand, teaching-wise, so sleep is a giant boon. We've had two days of Maudelle's brilliance, of participant brilliance, and now I will be coaxing a day of revision play from everyone . . . hoping to keep the enthusiasm trembling, hoping to keep everyone in joy and cogitation.

It's been a beautiful week. A really beautiful week. 

The house of poetry peers among the birches, down toward the lake. The lake is glass this morning, though the air flutters with life. Killdeer and red-winged blackbirds trill and screek, bullfrogs burp among the reeds, a hummingbird buzzes my head.

Though it's been very hot in Maine, lakeside life is breezy and welcoming. Late afternoon I slipped into the lake, into water a clear bright brown, ripples ripening in sunlight and shadow, a handful of idle poets splashing and musing under a bowl of sky.

Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing. The delight of the participants washes over me. "I'm in hog heaven," said a poet yesterday, leaning back into the lake, the lake leaning into her.

We'd spent a long intense day with Maudelle's magnificent wanderings among sound and meter and our brains' evolutionary miracles. Everyone is excited; everyone is inhaling deeply. The place is taking care of us. There is an extraordinary peace. It is not like Franconia. It is another world; it tugs away at the weariness in an entirely different way. But the poets still cast their spells, and their magic quivers.

Lake Hebron is a different world this morning. After a day of fog and downpour, I woke to blue skies, a rim of pink-tinged cloud rolling over the far shore, tree shadow and ripples, the cries of blackbirds and frogs, the tap of last night's rainwater running off the roof onto the deck behind me. 

For some reason there are no bugs. None. Not a single mosquito. I cannot figure this out. In my day this was the Land of the Insect. If I were sitting outside with bare shoulders on an open deck, I would also be writhing and slapping incessantly. What is this strange calm?

Yesterday was a long day, a hard-work day, but I think things are going really well. The group is focused and friendly and excited, new faces integrating with familiar ones, already some tears but good and useful ones. For the first time I began a teaching conference with a poem that wasn't Robert Frost's. This year we worked on two--a Richard Wright and a Czeslaw Milosz--and we spent the whole day on matters of form. The change was actually pretty exciting.

I'm decently rested this morning and ready to find out what happens next.

Lake Hebron this morning--water and sky inseparable under deep fog. We arrived yesterday in a downpour, and the downpours continued off and on all night, so grass and trees and Adirondack chairs are drenched in wet. But now there is no rain and no wind, and bullfrogs and red-winged blackbirds pepper the fog with sound.

I didn't sleep magnificently last night, but eventually I did drop off, which is about as much sleep as I usually hope for on a conference night. Everyone seems really, really happy to be here--delighted with the comforts of their digs, pleased by the lake and the walkable town and the good cheer of the staff, and for me this is a massive relief.

I am sitting here, freshly showered, in a clean summer dress, at the cabin's big sliding door. I am sitting here with my cup of hot black coffee, and I am slowly coming to grips with being awake. I need to pull out my papers and start looking at plans: this is a big teaching day for me. But the fog and the bullfrogs and my half-sleep are keeping me slow. It's very quiet down here. Usually I room up by the main road, where the log trucks starting running before dawn. But the lakefront is a different world.

Well, wish me luck. It's a new venture, it's a familiar venture, and who knows what will happen next.

Yesterday was exactly what it needed to be--a few chores inside and out, packing accomplished, and then I hung out with T. We went for a walk, we listened to baseball, we played cards, we made crab cakes and ceviche and ate them outside in the gloaming, we watched a Peter Gunn episode, and then we wandered outside and sat down on the curb and watched the city fireworks from our own street.

And today I head north . . . though first I have to pick up Teresa and her husband at the airport, bring them back to the house, and feed us all some lunch. A big salad and a batch of cornbread is my plan.

I did not dream of chairs at all last night, thank goodness. Instead, I am feeling rested and relatively pulled together, and ready for the big job. I am excited about seeing my friends. Poems are swirling in my head. I wish T and I weren't about to be separated, but reuniting is its own pleasure, and we are looking forward to it.

I'm sure I'll have at least a few chances to write to you over the course of the week. Maybe you'll hear from me every day, or maybe not. In any case: imagine poems, and a summer lake, and laughter and tears.

Last night my brain would not stop fretting over repetitive unnecessary not-even-real-worries, such as "How will I arrange the chairs for the conference?" and "Where should I put the chairs?" and "Chairs! Think about them!" and "Dawn, do not forget chairs!" and "For god's sake, the chairs!" and and and. Finally I got out of bed and came downstairs to the couch, hoping that a change of scenery would distract me from the stupid chairs, and eventually I did fall asleep there, and slept late, too, waking to a sudden crash of rain and the thick confusion of Why Am I Here? but blessedly without a single chair in my thoughts.

Yesterday I cleaned the house if not thoroughly then pretty damn close to thoroughly--floors washed, windows washed, the downstairs well dusted, bathroom scrubbed to the baseboards, even the basement stairs vacuumed. This morning everything inside still smells soapy and fresh, and it mingles with the rain-scent rising from the pavement and the coffee steam rising from my cup, and I am happy to be sitting here beside an open window, surrounded by soft air and clean order.

Today I'll mow grass, do some gardening, hang sheets on the line. I'll pack clothes for the conference, and T and I will make crab cakes and scallop ceviche for dinner, and I'll sit around and read Keats's bio and Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart and maybe take a nap and probably go for a walk . . . What I want is a slow day before tomorrow's flurry kicks in. What I want is to not think about chairs at all.

If you happen to be in central Maine this coming week, please remember that the conference readings are free and open to the public: Maudelle Driskell reads on July 7, I read on July 8, Teresa Carson reads on July 10, all at 7 p.m. at Tenney House (47 Tenney Road), the first Monson Arts building on the left as you come around the curve into town from the south. Teresa and Maudelle have never read in Maine before, and they are ambitious poets and tremendous human beings, and I urge you to see one or both of them if you can. The staff is working on a livestream option, and I will keep you posted on whether or not that will be available.

In other goings-on: this is the cover photo for Calendar, my forthcoming poetry collection. I published my first book just before I turned 40, and now at nearly 60, I am publishing my tenth, which is amazing to me. Twenty hard years of writing. How did I ever do it? I have no idea. This is Tom's photo, of course--a portrait of the top of our Harmony driveway during spring mud season. The puddles look like serene ponds but are actually car-destroying potholes. That could be a general metaphor for life in the woods.

Today: housework, yardwork, laundry, errand running. I want to get to the fish market to buy picked crab for tomorrow's crab cakes. I need to get a stain out of a dress. The weather up north will be sultry, but no doubt also buggy, and probably cool at night and maybe rainy now and again, so packing will be complex, as it always was for the Frost Place. The rural north loves extremes. With a big lake right outside my cabin, there's also water to be considered. I'm not much of a swimmer, but on a hot afternoon I might be a dabbler, and maybe there will be kayaks or canoes, which are more in my line. 

It's odd heading out to a place that is both known (I teach kids in Monson and used to live 20 miles down the road) and unknown (I've never spent so much time in town; I've never taught there in the summer; I've never led the conference there). I hope the days will go well; I think they will. But I also don't quite know what to expect, especially around the edges.

Yesterday was washing coats, washing sweaters, washing windows, plus running errands, scrawling packing lists, checking in with faculty and participants. Another thing I did was yank out the weary peavines, so this morning, before the heat kicks in, I'll be out in the garden sowing kale seed in the bare patch. Mid-morning: a haircut appointment, and then home to tackle more window washing and list scrawling.

Amid the flurry I tinkered with a poem revision and I finished reading Everett's James. Then, last night, I slipped Jackson Bate's biography of Keats off the shelf, so that's what I'm musing over at the moment, though I don't know if I'll make it all the way through the tome on this rereading. It is, without doubt, my favorite literary biography, but I'm not sure it's quite the thing for lakeside rest after the rigors of a poetry-teaching day. Yet it might be. Books are surprising.

Temperatures cooled off last night, so now balmy air wafts through the open windows, the birds sing furiously, and a first finger of sunlight cuts through the flat dawn sky. It's been a bad news week, and I continue to strenuously avoid the poisons of my phone. But venom leaks out all the same. 

I am trying hard to live in the present tense, to be aware of my body in the world, to attend to my mind and my responsibilities, to make room for idleness and vigor. Anything to keep worry, that incubus, at bay. Anxiety is my least productive habit: it consumes so much time and strength, and it is 100 percent useless.

And I will need all of my strength for the teaching conference, where everyone else's anxiety will be in top gear, where poems will start fires that cannot be quenched, where feelings will be pulsing and raw. Of course, box of tissues is one of the items scrawled on my list. Every year at the conference people cry and cry. But this year I might need two boxes.

"So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped."

                                                      --Louise Erdrich, "Shamengwa"

* * *

Over the weekend I finished reading Erdrich's story collection The Red Convertible and began reading Percival Everett's James, which I'd tried to take out from the library months ago and which finally arrived last week after I'd entirely forgotten about it. Now that I'm living in a home filled with clean and airy shelves, I am happy to be starting a new novel that I don't immediately have to find space for, a book that will return from whence it came.

The spring cleaning (summer cleaning?) continues around here: yesterday I finally finished the kitchen--all of the cupboards and drawers washed out and reorganized, the refrigerator scrubbed, the closet vacuumed. Next up: windows and winter woolens and coats. Jeesh, a housewife's work is never done.

"Deformed by my art." I am still fidgeting with that notion . . . not the deformed part so much as the art part, which is a term that I find porous and inexact, at least as regards my own life. Am I more of a poet than I am a teacher or a cook or a gardener or even a striving partner to my beloved? I don't know how to answer that question. Last week, during our Rockland workshop, Gretchen emphasized the term maker. In her view, this wording was a way to take ourselves off the hot seat. We don't have to be artists. We can simply rest in the present-tense of creating whatever it is we are creating at the moment. I take her point, but also . . . I want to be an artist. I am an artist. I obsess over the making. The making thickens over time. I overflow with the making. I cannot contain it. But what is being shaped?

As for being deformed. Well, I can offer physical proof of that. When I put my hands together, I can see that all of the fingers on my left hand are notably longer than the fingers on my right hand . . . at least half an inch longer. They are also all crooked, all of them curved out of shape. This is the result of extreme instrument practice at a very young age. The bones of my left hand grew around the neck of a violin.

And yet I did not write violin on my litany of art. I don't know where to put it. I don't know where or how one art changes into another; I don't know to track the influence of my own making. It is all so complicated.