Okay, one more writing post, and then I'll revert to telling you what I made for dinner and what the cat said about it.

In his conversation last week, Terrance Hayes talked about sonnet structure. As you know, formal sonnets are fourteen lines long and have standard rhyme schemes. Those rhyme schemes are broken into sections. For instance, a Petrarchan sonnet is constructed of two stacked rhyming patterns: the first eight lines follow one pattern; the last six lines follow another. A Shakespearean sonnet is constructed of twelve lines in one pattern, two in the other. The disruption in the rhyme scheme is called the volta, or turn, which Hayes refers to as "the place where the poem changes its mind." A Petrarchan sonnet changes its mind almost in the middle of the poem. A Shakespearean sonnet changes its mind suddenly at the end. Thus, if you're choosing one sonnet form over another, you've got to consider the amount of space you need for your change.

So what about the contemporary form known as the American sonnet? In the simplest definition, an American sonnet is an unrhymed, unmetered fourteen-line poem. Where does that leave the volta? When Hayes was writing his Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he decided to challenge himself to change his mind at least twice in each sonnet . . . because Americans are always changing our minds. Thus, the volta became more than a single veer; it was an electrical switch, careening the poem back and forth into new directions.

His description of this process made me reconsider the traditional sonnet forms. I've never liked the word turn as a descriptor. I've never actually known what it means: it's mealy-mouthed, secretive, a colorless teacher's manual definition. But if I think of volta as electricity, a jolt, a swerve, a shock--ah, now, that's a poem I want to write.

I've still been thinking about some of the things Terrance Hayes said regarding practice versus exercise in the life of a professional writer. I use the word professional guardedly here. I'm not implying that, as a professional, one needs to be widely published, or even published at all. Of course Emily Dickinson was a professional writer. But to be a professional, rather than an apprentice or an amateur, I think one needs to be writing consistently (that is, writing regularly every day or almost every day) and with purposeful self-discipline (attending closely to one's own work, devising ways to change and grow, no longer depending primarily on exterior teachers to guide or inspire you).

In Hayes's terms, practice is the everyday writing habit and exercise is the specific task we set ourselves to push our work into the complex and the unexpected. What is my practice? Well, this blog is a big part of my practice: every single morning I write you a letter about whatever flies into my head. I also keep a daily dream diary, in which I record whatever scraps I can recall from my very colorful dreams--not to analyze them but because recording my dream imagination is a useful aid to stretching my poetic imagination. Also, I read a book during every interstice of my life. Thus, even if I don't actually work on a poem during a given day, I am steadily practicing poems.

So what am I doing for exercise? I have always set myself tasks, and some of them have been vast. Copying out all of Paradise Lost and simultaneously writing essays about the project was an exercise. So was writing hundreds of poems based on primary sources from the history of Appalachian Pennsylvania. But most of my self-imposed tasks are smaller: write a sonnet that exactly replicates the meter of my favorite George Herbert sonnet; start every stanza of a poem about ancient Greece using contemporary business-memo jargon. Sometimes these exercises lead me straight to the dump; sometimes they don't. The point is that they push me out of my cozy shoot-a-few-hoops relationship with my familiar style and voice. They challenge me; they make me uncomfortable; they make me solve problems; they make me tumble into the private unknown; and over time they make me better at my job.

My Thursday night writing group is a weekly collaborative exercise: we all write first drafts to unexpected prompts. But I continue to follow my own exercise regimen as well. Currently, I am immersed in a project that involves using adages, philosophical claims, lines from old poets, etc., as the skeleton frame for my own new drafts. For instance, I might choose Plato's statement "Everything that deceives may be said to enchant." On a page I arrange the statement like this:

Everything

that

deceives

may

be

said

to

enchant

Now I have to write a draft in which each line starts with the given word. Thus, the left margin is rigidly proscribed but the right margin is ragged and loose. I have been doing this exercise over and over again, with lines from Plato, Virgil, Shakespeare, and on and on. Each poem is constrained by the left margin; each poem is careening crazily on the right margin; but the results have been exciting and new and fascinating to me, and I am learning so much.

How does this exercise help me? I tend to be rigidly controlled by sound, and this exercise forces me to override my classically trained ear. I tend to gravitate to formal stanzas, and this exercise pushes me to create long lines and harsh line breaks. I have a tendency to carve out dramatic endings. This exercise requires me to make the best of where I end up.

This is the draft I came up with from that exercise. It is not a great poem, but it is an interesting poem to me, as the practitioner, as the exerciser. Maybe you can see how the exercise is making me step into mudholes I ordinarily avoid, how it's pushing me to recognize that those mudholes are portals into new experiences: awkwardness, chaos, clangor, emotional confusion. (I reduced the size of the font so that you can see how long the lines are.)

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant

Everything flies away in this cold wind—dead leaves, tattered flags, my amour propre,

that old liar, that old cheat, that greedy faker, who ten months out of the year

deceives me into thinking I have a purpose on this high-falutin planet (“why, you

may learn a thing or two”) until a March gale rolls me some side eye and sniggers,

“Be real.” Today I walked down the sidewalk at 8 a.m. and a mincing snowdrop

said, “Stop staring.” Now I don’t know where to put my sadness.

To live is to forget how. It’s not even lunchtime yet. Oh, toiling heart,

enchant me, enchant me . . . then do it again.

Tomorrow I might write a bit about the sonnet thoughts that Hayes shared. But I guess for now one thing I want to implore of you, dear fellow strivers, is to take a look at your practice and your exercise. If you write the same neat tiny poems day after day, if your habit is to edit yourself down into exquisiteness, invent a project that pushes you to fill long lines with mess, and see what you find, where you go. If every draft involves an "I" taking a brief trip into memory and then coming to a deft conclusion, challenge yourself to write ten third-person poems filled with lies.

Lord knows, I'm not trying to set myself up as a guru or an egomaniac. I am a chump at heart. But I'm a chump with a mulish streak, and I have to make the best of what I've got to work with. My point is: if we keep standing at the free throw line and shooting one tidy basket after another, we're missing a world of three-pointers and goofy spin shots. Yes, we reveal our weakness. But we also might get a lot better at our art.

It's snowing hard this morning, and it's supposed to snow and sleet and rain all day long. So because of the storm and because it's Saturday and because I am a comfort-loving hausfrau, I am lighting the wood stove for what may be our final all-day fire of the season. Truly, nothing takes the sting out of a March clipper like a beautiful log fire, though it is odd to be tucked up next to the flames and the warmth while also listening to robin song pour from the snow-decked maples. The weather may be nasty, but the birds stay focused on matters of spring.

The little house is at its best right now . . . the rooms are snug, the flames dance, a bouquet of bright Gerbera daisies on the mantle teases thoughts of summer. Upstairs my beloved sighs and sleeps as the cat tucks behind his knees. I cannot wish to be anywhere else.

This is my last quiet weekend before the onslaught of April. So today I'll do some baking. I'll work on poem drafts. I'll read. I'll watch a little basketball and listen to a little baseball. I'll doze. I'll play card games with Tom and banter with the cat. I wouldn't have requested a spring snowstorm, but now that it's here, I'll enjoy the benefits. A day of putter and space, a day of dreaminess. Vive la snow day.

I've started off the morning with a bang, by catching a toe on a riser and splattering an entire cup of coffee all over the stairs. Clumsy Dawn strikes again. And what a waste of good hot coffee.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to ponder the dream I just woke up from, in which my father appears at my door to inform me that he's driving to Ontario by himself to move into a cabin so he can get away from everything. (The man in waking life is already away from everything so hmm.) And I'm still a little buzzy from last night's reading: Terrance Hayes talked about sonnet structure in a way I've never considered, and I've thought about sonnets a lot, so that was a bit of amazing good fortune. Afterward a bunch of poets went out to dinner, and one of our waiters clearly wanted to horn in on the writer conversation, and the other waiter turned out to be an ex-student of one of our poets, and we talked and ate and gossiped and then I walked around the corner and I was home and Tom said, "I'm glad you had such a good evening."

Today I've got to get onto my mat, and then I've got to trundle out to the grocery store because we're forecast to get five inches of snow tomorrow. I guess T won't be installing my new garden boxes on Saturday. I've been making good progress with my editing project, so I'm considering taking a chunk of the day to write and read. I've also got student work to annotate and conference planning to work on, but what I really want to do is mess around with my own stuff.

Terrance Hayes was talking about various writing-related things yesterday, among them the notion of practice (the everyday commitment to writing) versus exercise (the specific tasks we put to ourselves to expand ourselves as writers). He also talked about writing without goals: just letting ourselves make things without any notion of what they will be when they're finished. These all seem like givens to me; that is exactly how I work. Yet I find them extremely difficult to teach. I'm constantly wrestling with how to guide students of all ages into regular, relaxed, everyday practice; into specific experiment within that practice; into comfort with an unknown trajectory. Along with intense reading and, especially, intense rereading, these behaviors feel essential to the lives of all of the best writers I know well. But I sometimes ask myself, Are they teachable? My students, of all ages, resist. They make excuses for their own habits--"I don't have time to write every day"; "I don't like to try new things"; "I hate not knowing where I'm going"; "I rarely reread a book." And all of that is fine, all of that is great . . . except that, if we're going to write better and better poems, changing those behaviors turns out to be necessary.

Home again, and glad to be here. But my class yesterday was so pleasant--kids working hard and with enthusiasm, choosing and typing up their final pieces for display. Though I always give everyone the option to focus on prose, this year's kids seem primarily to be writing poems, and they've got scads of drafts to sift through and think over. And they really do think: it is heartwarming to watch twelve kids studying their notebooks so intensely. We've got one more class to refine their final drafts--titles, punctuation, sound--and  then, essentially, our year is done--just one last session, which will probably be a create-your-own-script and-performance-from-start-to-finish whizbanger, a guaranteed day of silliness.

This morning I'll go out for a fast walk; then I'll work at my desk, eventually get a haircut, and this evening my poetry group will meet to see Terrance Hayes read at the University of Southern Maine. I'm happy to watch him, but I am sad we won't be writing tonight: I've missed the group for two weeks in a row, and I'm eager to get my habits back on track.

I've started rereading Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which is a difficult and dense and painful book that feels right to me just now. I may turn to Henry James next: apparently I am longing for complication.

Meanwhile, the weather shivers. Our snow has melted, but the air stays cold and there's more snow in the forecast for the weekend. Spring in Maine is a bouquet of dashed hopes. But I love it anyway.

Last night during dinner the air suddenly filled with fat white flakes, like a blizzard of torn paper, dense and eloquent, the most beautiful of snows.

Oh, the grandeur of the north, even as mud season looms.

There we were, eating a Thanksgiving dinner in March, while the snow whirled and the cookstove clicked.

Do you see why I miss this place?

It snowed yesterday--the sort of garbagy, slush-from-the-sky, late March clipper that depresses all hopes. Thank goodness for a wood stove: without a fire to soothe my eyes, I would have been dismal indeed. Now this morning a hard crust coats every tulip leaf, every lilac bud. I know the ice will melt away under sunlight, but for the moment winter is strutting around the ring while spring sobs in the corner with a black eye.

This afternoon I'll be driving north into the homeland, where winter really is still king. But despite the weather, the school year is rolling toward the finish line. I've only got three classes left with my high schoolers, and we need to get cracking on our final projects. The days have whipped by: I feel like I've barely gotten to know these kids, and now they're flying away from me. That is always the story of teaching.

So this morning I'll pull myself together for travel. Yesterday I finished my weekly house chores, edited a couple of chapters, went for a fast walk in the pre-storm chill. I read about Paris and pored over the paintings of Sargent. I drank many cups of ginger tea and baked a chicken potpie. Two weeks ago I drove north feeling like I'd been drained by a vampire. I may not be writing good poems at the moment, but at least I've got blood in my veins again.

I think, possibly, maybe, that I'm almost feeling like myself again. I had a busy, physical weekend, but I didn't take one single nap, and I got a lot more accomplished than I thought I would. I cleared leaves, ripped up the stones in my garden paths, made bread, scrubbed bathrooms. I hung around admiring Tom as he built two new garden boxes, which he'll install next weekend. We watched Cooper Flagg, our central Maine basketball star, propel Duke to the Sweet Sixteen. We ate a giant meal of lamb burgers, fried onions and peppers, homemade buns, potato salad, roasted green beans, and feta, followed by blueberry flan. I slept all night. And now it is Monday morning, and I do not feel like a damp rag.

I'll be on the road tomorrow and teaching in Monson on Wednesday, but today I'll be home--editing, finishing up my weekly housework chores, catching up on reading projects, maybe transplanting shrubs, if the wind isn't too vicious.

I've been reading about the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune--not a heartening history at any time, certainly not in our current state of chaos. But I'm also realizing how many great artists found their metiers in the years surrounding these disasters--painters such as Sargent and Cassatt, for instance.

The work goes on. The work requires us.

 "Our life really is a haunted one. The simplest thing in it is a mystery, the invisible world always lies round us like a shadow."

                                                                               --Harriet Beecher Stowe

**

For the first time this season, I spent most of my day in the yard--clearing leaves, bagging sticks, pruning shrubs, transplanting spinach. Tom was outside, too, beginning work on the new garden boxes he's building from scavenged boards. This means disruption: I've got to pull up most of the slate paths I've laid so we can accommodate the new design. And then I'll have to buy a giant pile of fresh soil and toil for hours filling the vast new containers. But the end result will be both more beautiful and more utilitarian, so the fuss is worth it.

Every year I am amazed at how much work it takes to keep this tiny city plot in cultivation. How ever did we manage 40 acres, two babies, and a barnful of animals? "The simplest thing . . . is a mystery."

Thanks to a day spent crouching and stooping and lifting, I am embracing the satisfactory ache of my gardening muscles this morning. It's funny: I am active all winter--working on my mat, trudging through the neighborhood--but gardening requires a particular combination of leg and back and arm and shoulder muscles that my winter upkeep regimen doesn't seem to touch. Gardening isn't just puttering among the flowers; it's real physical work . . . lugging rocks, digging holes, shoving wheelbarrows. But I am always glad to feel my body rising to the challenge, especially this year, after having been sick for so long.

Today will be cooler than yesterday, and will warm up more slowly. And I've got house and grocery chores to deal with as well, so I may not get much done outside. But I will start prying up the paths, and I might transplant a couple of elderberry shrubs. I cannot resist the carillon of spring.

Yesterday's convention presentation went well. We had maybe 50 teachers in our session, far more than I expected, and they seemed excited by the dictation/writing prompt/revision prompt strategies that Marita and I were offering. Now we'll see if that leads to any new signups for the Monson conference. I have hopes: some of the participants were pretty excited about what it felt like to play around with revision in this way.

But now it's Saturday, which means I can temporarily stop thinking about such matters. The weather will be cool but clear, and when the air warms up a bit I will get myself outside into the gardens and continue my leaf-removal tasks. I'll transplant spinach, and Tom and I will plan our new garden boxes, and in the kitchen a vat of chicken stock will simmer on the stove, and in the maples the cardinals will whistle and chortle, and I am looking forward to this day.

March has been relatively quiet for me, but April is shaping up to be crazy town. On April 5, I'll be reading at the South Portland Library. Then T and I will steal the following weekend to head to Mount Desert Island for our biannual cottage retreat. On April 19 I'll be teaching a Poetry Kitchen class. On April 25 I'll be going out to dinner with the poet Natalie Diaz (!). On April 26 I'll be taking a workshop with Diaz, listening to her read, and participating in an onstage conversation with Betsy Sholl about our work. And of course I'll be teaching in Monson and working on an editing project and mentoring a student book manuscript in the midst of all this. . . .

So a quiet weekend at home feels especially sweet. 

A steady rain is rattling down, one of those long slow all-day rains that gardens love. So no outside work today, maybe not even a walk. Instead, it will be a tuck-into-my-shell morning, mostly spent at my desk editing a snarl of legal footnotes. And then after lunch I'll doll myself up in a new dress and head downtown to the MCELA convention, where I'll be giving a presentation on revision, and hanging around the Monson Arts table hawking my programs, and otherwise behaving like a poet who is not curled under a turtle shell.

I've started reading a book I found on the street, David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a study of nineteenth-century travels to the City of Light. I've never been to Paris myself (outside of the airport), but I've certainly read lots of Henry James, so I'm finding the book more interesting than I expected . . . poignant, too--the way in which Americans, in all our raw brashness, can be suddenly toppled by awe. Who knows if we will ever be that wide-eyed nation again?

There was a scattering of rain overnight: I see dampness glistening under the streetlights, hear roof drip ticking against the vents. The shower is surely lifting the spirits of the greening plants I've been releasing from last fall's matted leaves. I've still got much more to do in that regard, but there's no rush. A little rain, a little sun, a little more rain, a little more sun. My leaf chore is the least important task.

But it's been tonic to be outside, bending and stooping and lifting and carrying. It's been good to unfold my wintered-over muscles, to start living in my senses again. And I get such extreme pleasure from these early blooms: the crocuses, the snowdrops, so doughty and delicate, so tough and translucent.

The big new editing project did arrive yesterday, so today I'll be back to a regular desk schedule. I'll walk first, then slide myself into my work hours. I'll go out to write in the evening. I'll be a plain useful citizen  of the word.

Workwise, this has been a quieter week than I thought it would be, mostly because the new editing project that was supposed to arrive on Monday still hasn't made an appearance. I've filled the time with a smaller editing assignment and high school class planning, and yesterday I started two new poem drafts. I haven't written anything else in the weeks since I've started being sick, so that was a good sign: my brain is trying out a few dance steps again. Then, in the afternoon, I unearthed the wheelbarrow and began clearing leaves out of garden beds, another promising sign. Looks like maybe I won't be ill forever.

I expect the new editing project will arrive today, but till then I've got to make my own work. I'll mess with those poem drafts, read some Coleridge and Wordsworth, go for a walk. I'll clear leaves out of garden beds, hang laundry, roast a chicken. My connections to daily life still feel strangely air-brushed, but I'm drifting back into the blunt quotidian. I guess it's a good week to be underemployed. Still, I'd best be back to normal by Friday, when I've got to give a presentation in front of a pack of English teachers at the MCELA convention. Wish me luck.

What a wet day we had yesterday! It was a real spring rain, heavy and warm, and I am eager to hustle outside this morning to see what it has coaxed forth. Already I glimpse patches of purple and yellow crocuses budding up in the front gardens, a snowdrop lifting its head out back. With such a start, even a wobbly ray of sun will unfold wonders.

I am sick of being sick. Whatever ails me has been clinging like a burr, but slowly my energy is returning. I mopped and vacuumed and cleaned bathrooms yesterday, edited a 50-page academic article, behaved more or less like a person who can get things done. Today I'll work on class plans for my high schoolers, get the grocery shopping done, read Wordsworth and Coleridge, maybe start my next editing project if I receive it early enough in the day, maybe do some raking if the yard has dried out and I haven't gone limp. At least I'm not on the road this week and can collapse in the afternoons if I need to.

Monday morning, pouring rain, T is bustling off to work, P is bustling back to NYC, and an hour from now I will have dropped him off at the bus station, I will be stepping back into a quiet house, into my solitary hours, with the rain falling falling, gray daylight unfolding over the streets, my thoughts bumping up against themselves, the unsaid, velvet and thorns.

Yesterday was an annoying day as I ended up in the emergency room because of chest pain. Do not panic; I am fine. But when you're 60 years old and you're talking to medical personnel while trying to figure out ongoing weirdness, each symptom you mention sounds like incipient heart attack. And thus there we were: sent to the ER for tests. It's good and relieving news to know that every single one came back as normal, but I do not want to see the bill for this, and I'm still no clearer about what the hell with my ongoing floating rib-cage pain. All I can assume is some kind of virus. But at least everyone is now confident that I'm not about to drop dead.

Anyway, enough of that irritating subject. It's Sunday morning; I slept well last night and feel okay so far this morning. I've got plans to walk to a friend's house and prep for our conference presentation. And then I'll figure out how to cook corned beef. I rarely bother with Saint Patrick's Day, but Paul loves a holiday dinner and I can't resist a coaxing son.

Interview about "To the Republic"

A few week's ago Vox Populi published my poem "To the Republic," a poem I wrote in (sort of) response to Horace's ode of the same name. My friend David Dear was puzzled by my poem, also puzzled by how the two poems were interconnected, so I invited him to write up a few questions and said I would try to answer them. Yesterday I sat down with those questions, which (not surprisingly, if you know David) were cogent and curious and demanded considerable thought from me. So today, with his permission, I'm sharing this Q&A about the poems.

1. Given that the Horace seems a relatively straightforward allegory, while yours is much more allusive, why did you choose Horace’s as the reference point for yours?

My poem was born during a session of my Thursday-night writing group. Each week, between four and ten women meet for a meal and then write two or three new drafts triggered by prompts that one or the other of us brings along. This draft arose from a very simple prompt that I brought to the group. Merely, we read Horace’s poem, reacted to it briefly, and then I said, “Write a poem titled ‘To the Republic.’” Each of us then wrote for ten minutes and afterward shared our drafts. We never do any workshopping of these drafts; merely we react to what we’re hearing and then move on. But what struck me about this raw work was how different our drafts all were from Horace’s. Each was a metaphor-in-embryo, and all reflected very individual, very private engagements with the notion of republic. No one wrote a “ship of state” kind of piece as he did. One could speculate on the reasons for that: a modern tendency to center work around the personal rather than the polemical; a male-female divide. But what I think, too, is that this very simple prompt tapped into a particular feature of metaphorical search that I have since identified in many resistance poems: the use of metaphor as both cloak (that is, protection from attack) and dagger (a weapon for attack). In addition, the prompt allowed me to see that preplanning a metaphor (Horace’s, for instance, feels very preplanned; Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” is another) is different work from allowing a metaphor to take form organically . . . that is, letting a new poem discover, via the process of writing, the metaphor it will become. 

 2. Horace’s and yours are very different in form; yours in fact could be considered a sonnet. Was that a conscious choice and, if so, why that form?

I did not make any attempt to imitate Horace’s form, nor was I consciously framing my poem as a sonnet. Nonetheless, my thoughts are filled with sonnets, and I fairly often end up with fourteen-liners without trying to. The stanzas here are not traditional octaves and sestets but two sets of five followed by one set of four. So even though they add up to fourteen lines, I found myself playing with them as three five-line stanzas with the final line missing. So, no volta . . . rather, the absence of volta; something unresolved; something darkening.

 3. The light in your poem grows darker as the poem moves along, which seems clearly a metaphor, yet your description of nightfall evokes such quiet and peace. Why the apparent contrast?

The word republic evokes country. On that level of connotation, I love my country, and I fear for my country; ergo, the darkening. The word country itself has double meaning: the nation and the countryside. As a citizen, I am elegiac for my nation; and as a private person, I am elegiac for my forty acres of forest, now lost to me forever. So as I began to tease out new drafts of the poem, these metaphors entangled. Evening is a glorious moment in the Maine woods: the shifts of light, the day sounds becoming the night sounds, the animals alive in air and brush, the poignant singing thrush. But the woods at night are also full of danger. The predators emerge. And the small beings they hunt are not liable to see morning.

 4. Your poem features two animals of the night, an owl and a bat, and you’ve said the poem’s owl’s echoes of Minerva aren’t intentional. Why then did you choose those two, and what do you see them accomplishing in the poem?

I chose those two animals because they are exact for the situation. In the forest, on a summer night, at twilight, the owl and the bat take to the sky. They mark the transition between day and night. And of course they are both beautiful and deadly.

 5. In your last verse, what do you see the night not failing at?

I see the night as not failing to arrive. Twilight in summer is long and lingering, but night is still inevitable.

 6. Do you see the poem as optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

I don’t know that it’s either. I tried to write a poem that simply is. 

 7. It’s been said that a poem is never really finished, a poet eventually just walks away from it. Now that this one has been published, if you had the chance to go back to it, is there anything in it you’d change, and if so, what and why?

I wonder if the repetition of heavens (twice) and heavy so close to them is sonic overkill. I may tinker with that. 

Yesterday was pleasant and slow . . . mostly hanging around the house, but with an outing to the grocery store and then to a Japanese restaurant for a ramen-and-broth lunch. It's so nice to have a son around the house, to be aware of him as a presence, just another householder bumping around doing his own stuff, nobody entertaining anyone else but constantly overlapping in a casual friendly way. Another good thing is that a couple of his closest college friends have moved to Portland since graduation, so now he has a social life beyond his parents when he comes back to Maine. That loneliness was hard to witness when we first moved, especially as it intensified over the pandemic. It lifts my heart to watch him stride outside to greet a waiting friend.

Today he starts his wilderness first responder class, so I'll be back to my usual solitude. I've got a few things to do, emails and class prep and such, and I also want to work on answering a series of questions a friend wrote up about one of my newer poems. I missed my weekly Thursday-night writing group last night, so I'd like to give myself a prompt or two as solace. And next Friday's conference presentation is looming; I should probably run my eyes over those plans.

I'm still not 100 percent healthy, but every day is better. Whatever this illness is, it's clingy, though not debilitating. I want to go for a walk, I want to scratch around in garden soil, but the weather has been cold and windy and not so alluring for a semi-convalescent. I have been getting outside, but I haven't been luxuriating. I'm eager for the soft air.

I had a great day in the classroom with my son. The kids were attentive, chattery, busy, focused, and laughing . . . the session was a complete success. It's a joy to teach with P, a joy to watch his eagerness with the students, to see him think his way through those little intuitive adjustments that are part of every classroom improv.

What a relief not to be flat on my back, too, though I wouldn't say that I am 100 percent well yet . . . still a bit of fatigue and achiness, not quite full enthusiasm about my meals, but I am almost a replica of normal. 

Nonetheless, it is nice to have an unscheduled, unbusy, convalescent day ahead of me . . . idling with a book, going for a walk, running a few errands, playing a board game, taking a nap, doing a few unpressured household chores. I do not know what this illness is (negative Covid test, if you need reassurance), but it's clingy in a low-level way and I would like to erase it thoroughly.

I still felt kind of crappy yesterday morning, but we did drive north in the afternoon, and by the time we arrived my little virus had dissipated and I was feeling mostly back to normal. Thank goodness. I was having visions of sending P alone into the classroom while I lay in bed shivering . . . not what I was hoping for from this class or our visit.

We're staying in a cabin down by the lake, still ice-covered but glossed in water. Every once in a while a snowmobile tears across it at full speed, a spume of spray rising behind. I keep expecting the lake to split open and swallow them up, but the guy at the restaurant says the ice is still two feet thick beneath the skim of melt. Then he says he wouldn't ride across it. I nod, and let ambiguity have the win.

Well, my kid's here, hurray!, but I am unfortunately feeling slightly under the weather . . . not so much so that I can't drive north and do my job but enough to make life less than fun than it was. I did get a solid night's sleep, and here's hoping I continue to feel better this morning. I'll keep you posted.

On the first 40-degree Sunday afternoon of the season, we went to Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth and trudged under this landscape-painter sky, over this curve of wet sand, alongside these slow wrinkles of seawater. Afterward we stopped at a tap house and ate poutine and drank beer and played cards, and then we spent the rest of the evening reading on the couch in front of the fire. And that is why I did no housework, and why I'll be doing it all today.

Our son arrives tonight, so I'll be preparing for that too: turning my study into a bedroom for the week, figuring out a general idea for meals, pulling myself together for our travels up to Monson tomorrow. It will be sweet to have him for such a long stretch--the longest since the pandemic, when he lived with us for a year and a half.

And maybe I'll get to that rose pruning too. Or maybe I'll steal a nap instead. This time change is not easy on people who have to get up at 5 a.m. every weekday.

I've almost finished rereading Far from the Madding Crowd, and I don't have anything lined up to start next--always an uneasy feeling. But something will shout at me from the shelves.

I woke this morning at the regular time but the clocks say I stayed in bed till after 6 so, okay, let's call it sleeping late, but whatever the time the sky is wondrous, a chill pale blue flecked with gulls soaring up from the cove, and the winds have died down, so now the quiet air smells of cold soil and cold salt, half-melted ice piles glisten under new sunlight, and inside the house the furnace grumbles, the cat crunches chow, a thread of steam rises from my coffee cup . . . it is Sunday morning, it is March in Maine, the little house crouches among its dim little gardens, where at the edge of the snow a hellebore, the lenten rose, dormant all winter, is beginning to uncurl its thick stems and lift its heavy buds toward the sun.

If I say I'm tired, I only mean I'm human. My mind ticks off its little tasks for the day . . . buying groceries, cleaning bathrooms, watering houseplants, hanging laundry. If I say I'm sad, I only mean that the earth is so small and space is so vast.

Here it is the weekend, and here I am not sleeping late, which is always a little disappointing, though on the other hand I do like being awake and alone and curled into my couch corner as house and neighborhood slowly shift into daylight. I have some hopes of pruning rosebushes this weekend, which Tom thinks is a silly idea ("There's still snow!") and I think is a charming idea ("There's less snow!"). Roses should be pruned very early in the spring, and since there's nothing else I can do in the garden yet, I always think of that project as an inauguration. But it's true that the air might not be quite warm enough for me to really enjoy myself. I guess I'll have to wait and hope.

Meanwhile, I'm catching glimpses of last fall's spinach crop, green and eager against the muddy soil. And as soon as the snow melts a bit more, I'll be able to get into the kale bed, cut away the winter-wilted stalks, and make way for new shoots. The suddenness of spring is always an amazement: by the end of the month I should be harvesting.

I started off yesterday feeling a little glum about myself, but then at lunchtime I had a surprise visit from north-country friends, and afterward I spent all afternoon talking to Teresa and Jeannie about poems. So I'm more or less back on track now, still a little wobbly, but who isn't? I'm reading Thomas Hardy, I'm slicing up vegetables, I'm stoking the wood stove, I'm shamelessly enjoying these comma splices, I'm feeling the planet shift and roll beneath my feet.

Spring is, without question, my favorite season. Every year I am gobsmacked, exhilarated . . . I long for it. Spring is to the body what imagination is to the mind: a reckless wonder.

Yesterday's puddles have have tightened into ice. Walkways are glossy under the streetlights, and coaxing the recycling bin to the curb will be an adventure.

This afternoon Jeannie and Teresa and I will have our monthly Poetry Lab conversation, and I've been working on a set of poems to get ready, reading the books we've decided to discuss, jotting down various small thoughts to share. So I hope the sun comes out this morning and thaws the ice so I can get outside for a walk beforehand. My body is tired of winter.

I've plucked Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd off the shelf but haven't yet opened it. The poems of Garcia Lorca are rattling around in my skull. I want to be a real artist but I'm not sure I'll ever get there. I'm feeling cramped in myself. I'm not enough.

This is where the chores come in handy. Chop wood, haul water, as they say . . . that bossy, self-confident they, the booming pronouncements of the Eternal Dad. 

It's Friday, it's second-guess-myself day, it's what-the-hell-do-I-think-I'm-up-to day, and that always irritates the Eternal Dad. Find something to do or I'll find it for you, he warns. And eventually: Do you want me to give you something to cry about?

Rain poured all night, and is still pouring, and the temperature is 46 degrees, and I am eager, eager for daylight so I can see what's happening out there in the melting, waking-up world. Is the garlic sprouting? Are the maples budding? Will robins be hustling across the bare brown grass?

Today is Thursday, my writing-group night, and I have been writing all week, though mostly not poems, mostly introductions, discussion starters, and prompts for my poetry-as-resistance class, a task that always takes a long time, with the syllabus becoming a sort of personal essay for the release of my own thoughts. I don't lecture in class, but I do lecture myself into understanding how a class might unfold, and that all ends up on paper. I doubt this is an efficient approach to class planning, but it is the only way I know how to do it.

In the meantime I finished Villette and have taken a small breather with a thin Barbara Pym novel before I start the next big one--most likely Thomas Hardy. Still, I opened the Pym yesterday evening and this is what I found:

The small things of life were so often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, . . . the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

I was jolted. It is always unnerving when a book suddenly turns on me and says, "Hey, I've been watching you."

Sometimes, when I'm feeling maudlin, I wonder if there can be anyone on earth who loves reading more than I do. Of course, there are better readers, and smarter readers, more prescient readers, more analytical readers, readers with more stamina, braver and more adventurous readers, more precise readers. But do any of those readers adore their friends as much as I do?

I think of Charlotte Bronte. Yesterday I was almost complaining about her, but truth be told: while Emily is the more fashionable Bronte, Charlotte is all mine. On the simplest level, like Louisa May Alcott, she created characters who gave her readers hope. Jo in Little Women is encouragement for all bookish girls . . . yes, life is for you! And Bronte's heroines are encouragement for all plain and thorny girls . . . yes, you too can engage in aggressive, erotic warfare with the most interesting man in the room, and he will like it. But of course Bronte's writings are far more than romantic fantasy. They are delineations of self-repression. If Alcott's Jo yearns to leap into life with her arms open, Bronte's Lucy Snowe knows from the beginning that she must always stay wound in barbed wire. Though no matter how tightly she armors herself, there are chinks.

These tiny harsh women, wending their way across strange and unforgiving landscapes: they are nothing like me, either physically or spiritually, but I suffer with them again and again on each rereading.

Yesterday, as I scurried from car to fish market, car to Italian market, the breeze tearing up from the bay was like iron. But already it's much warmer outside than it was yesterday. The winds have shifted, the earth has turned; suddenly the scent of the air has changed, and the cat is bouncing up and down and batting at the door knob, begging to be let out.

For the past few days I've been rereading Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which is not a cheerful book. All of her novels are repressed chaos scattered with firefights and implosions, and this one in particular reeks of tamped-down arson. Probably it wasn't the best choice for the moment, but too late now: I'm stuck inside. Perhaps a walk in modest sunshine will be a moderating influence. Perhaps I could write a little arson myself, as an antidote.

I got my basic housework done yesterday, so my obligations are thin. Maybe today I'll spring-clean a room. Maybe today I'll work on writing prompts for my poetry-as-resistance class. Maybe I'll take the violin out of its case. Maybe someone will knock on the door and sweep me out of my rut. With all of the windows shut tight, the Bronte miasma is a bit overpowering.

The thermometer reads eight degrees this morning, but the weather forecast promises that today will be the last of the deep cold for a while. Ahead we've got days in the forties, maybe even reaching the fifties by next week, and I am eager for the muddy, melting mess that equals early spring in northern New England.

No travel this week, and a fairly loose schedule. I'm waiting for a new editing project, and P and I already have our planning done for next week's Monson scriptwriting class, so mostly I'll be working on teaching conference prep, the upcoming Poetry Kitchen class, and my own poems, along with whatever spring-cleaning projects I set for myself.

Yesterday I got a note from the publisher of Vox Populi telling me that my poem "To the Republic," released yesterday, "is the best poem about our national crisis that’s been written so far. It is a masterpiece of evocation and restraint." This is straight-up flattery and cannot possibly be true. Nonetheless, his kindness has led me to think about metaphor as both cloak and dagger. I think maybe I'll talk about that during my writing-for-the-resistance classes this spring.

Yesterday I caught sight of the first hyacinth spikes poking up in the warmth of our house foundation. The neighbor's snowdrops were eagerly blossoming; the cemetery walkways were a delta of puddles and lakes. But this morning we're back to cold, and the snowpiles are shiny with frozen snowmelt, and gritty and gray with time. March in Maine is not a beautiful month, at the ground level.

I've been dealing with a sciatica flareup and I gave into it yesterday--not doing nothing (I walked and stretched and kept up with my usual activities) but conscientiously managing it, carefully working around it, which is its own version of a chore. I hope all of my fuss will pay off with a better day today, but we'll see. Nerve pain follows its own mysterious schedule. I can go for months without a twinge, and then bam: the knife.

Yesterday I listened to a little spring training baseball. I marinated chicken in buttermilk, then oven-fried it alongside roasting Brussels sprouts. I read Charlotte Bronte's Villette, and went for a walk with Tom, and helped my kid edit his professional bio, and wrote emails to some writer friends, and fiddled around with poem drafts, and played cards, and took an afternoon nap. In other words, I didn't do much, and let's hope my right hip is grateful.

Vox Populi published one of my new poems today. It's titled "To the Republic." I'm sure the editor's timing was no mistake.

It is humiliating to be an American.

Over the phone my son asks, "What can I do? I have no power."

Every day the screeds of furious women thrash through my inbox. They want to organize marches, they want to read serious books, they want to write letters to the government. They are drenched in dread and impotence.

Over the phone I ask my son, "What good will this do? Whose mind will this change?"

Every day the internet throbs and twitches: boycott! general strike! 

Over the phone my son says, "Do they not understand that poor people have no choice about where and when to shop?" Over the phone I say, "Tom already works too many hours. We cannot afford to lose wages during a general strike."

Every day I think about how far away my sons live. What if the planes can no longer fly safely? What if the trains are defunded? What if there's a civil war? What if the Russians take over? What if my boys are conscripted? What if I never see them again?

Over the phone my son says, "I have painted my dining room four different bright colors."

Over the phone I say, "The cardinals are singing their spring songs."

It is terrifying to be an American.