A fresh coating of snow fell over night, and flakes are still drifting down. It's dark outside, and the neighborhood is a mystery of gleam and shadow, a noir film.

Yesterday I wrote out my plans for the upcoming revision weekend I'll be leading, always an intense process, more like writing a private essay for myself than a creating a brisk syllabus. In making these kinds of classes I find I have to explain myself to myself, examine the workings of my own mind in order to come to any kind of settlement about what can be taught. And revision is a tricky and resistant subject, one that can bring our timidities to the fore. It is a chance for teachers to be autocrats. It is a chance for participants to be cowed. It is a chance for teachers to overlook the patterns of their own imagination. It is a chance for participants to be defensive. None of these behaviors is useful to the poem, or to us.

The chaos in Washington. Already, crowd gunfire batters our humanism and we're only two weeks into this ordeal. I turn pages, I ponder writing prompts, I scribble notes about craft and storyworld, and my attempts may as well be a dream, or a hallucination. Who do I think I am, anyway, to care so hard about these things?

Next door, my neighbor's snowblower bursts into roar. Slowly I watch his silhouette pace back and forth up his driveway. Probably he'll clear our sidewalk too. We neither ask for nor deserve this attention; we're completely capable of shoveling ourselves out. Nonetheless, he offers this kindness, repeatedly and without words.

There is no way to square such plain generosity with the contorted vengefulness that is our new regime. It is like we have been invaded by aliens. And yet, somehow, the aliens are us.

Today I will read Austen's Emma. I will read the introduction to Lyrical Ballads. I will talk to Teresa and Jeannie about poems. I will play cards and laugh with Tom. But I hear the marching.