Yesterday's class was small but mighty, and I had the pleasure of watching several brand-new writing prompts, invented at my desk, beautifully unfold in the midst of a busy museum gallery. From theory to action: it was exciting. I don't often use other media as prompts--music sometimes, but rarely visual art--because I'm not a giant fan of typical ekphrastic approaches to poem writing. They always feel like interpretations or re-renderings rather than actual creative syntheses between art forms. But I think Gretchen's physical theater activities around the museum paintings were very freeing in that regard; they offer direct ways to see and focus and talk and create as a group without veering into ponderous judginess or "I'm smarter than you" territory. And interestingly, they also helped everyone become less self-conscious about what we were doing in public . . . when what we were doing was in fact taking up a lot of space in a crowded museum and creating tableaux with our bodies and doing all sorts of things that normally would make me flush with embarrassment. It was delightful, really, to care so little about how I looked.

I love learning, and co-teaching with a theater artist has been eye-opening in that regard. I am thinking in new ways about poetry as enactment, as self-invention, as collage, as spontaneous performance. I'm thinking much more about the porous boundaries among different versions of making. It's play and it's real discovery, in equal parts.

***

Today is my one day off, and there won't be much off about it as I have a thousand garden things to deal with and a backlog of laundry to manage and groceries to fetch and probably some other fat chore to manhandle that I've temporarily forgotten about. But at least I can start slowly. It's chilly outside, and hot black coffee tastes like the nectar of the gods, and my dumb thick bathrobe is ideal attire, and the cat and I are in a good mood with each other for a change. In the distance a ship hoots, a low moan like the call of a massive mythical owl. Always the sea . . . the vast North Atlantic around the corner, at the foot of the hill, tide lapping into coves and river mouths, Casco Bay becoming the Gulf of Maine becoming the great lurching open ocean.

And my little house, tucked up out of sight, but not out of wind or salt or sound.