Home again, in warmish, dripping Portland, Maine. We still have a thick snowpack, but all night chunks of snow and ice slid noisily off the roof as snowmelt pecked at the windows and vents. Today is forecast to be sunny and 45 degrees, and after a month of ice and cold I am itching to get outside, especially after hours spent in the classroom and the car. Maybe I'll see the first blooming snowdrops! I am excited to find out.

Yesterday was the final session in my big three-class revision event, and in two weeks my son will be with me to lead a fun day on scriptwriting. He'll be staying with us for a week, first teaching with me, then attending a several-day wilderness first responder class that he needs for his summer canoe job. It will be such a treat to have him around for so long--something to look forward to in March, a notably aggravating month in the north country.

Today I'll be back to editing in the morning, running errands in the afternoon, catching up on laundry and reading . . . the usual minutiae of my life. I've got a stack of poem drafts that I've been working on steadily for the past week, and I'm pleased with how they're opening up, how they're surprising me. It's been instructive to move from one to the other, noting how each requires a different reading, a different ear, a different experiment.

My thoughts about Nicholas Nickleby still linger. I've been playing with his "precision of exaggeration" in these drafts . . . and it is feeling like an important revision layer, one that intimately affects dramatic movement. None of these poems is long; a couple are extremely small; but that makes the need for dramatic control even more delicate and specific.

This work I do never stops thrilling me.