Like most poets, I can't make a living as a poet, so I have a handful of other jobs, one of which is working as a freelance copyeditor for university presses. This entails hours of untangling passive voice constructions, soothing ruffled haters of semicolons, and deleting and deleting and deleting repetition (a particular problem with ex-dissertations). It's not a thrilling job but not a terrible one either--rather analogous, I suppose, to being a composer who also spends a lot of time playing scales. What I mean is that editing other people's books may not be creative or intellectually stimulating; but it does require grammatical expertise, a focus on petty detail, and a sentence-reviser's musical ear. And unlike my own writing, editing allows me to stay detached. I have no particular stake in the matter other than wanting to do a good clean job that keeps the author feeling comfortable and secure and the press feeling satisfied enough to hire me again.

Sometimes I fret about having a job that doesn't demand my soul, but then again I've found myself engaged in such a variety of unpaid soul-sucking ventures that I think a few part-time, undemanding, middlebrow, hourly-wage editing projects don't necessarily mitigate against my ability to keep up a heavy schedule of falling off metaphorical Empire State Buildings.

Encouraging quote for the day: "The giant and the conjurer now knew that their wicked course was at an end, and they stood biting their thumbs and shaking with fear. Jack, with his sword of sharpness, soon killed the giant, and the magician was then carried away by a whirlwind; and every knight and beautiful lady who had been changed into birds and beasts returned to their proper shape."

--from "A History of Jack the Giant-Killer," collected in The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang (1889)

So today is my 44th birthday, and I am "celebrating" by kicking my online heels in the Boston Red Sox Virtual Waiting Room, where I am trying to buy ALCS tickets for my son. I have been waiting for so long that probably they are all sold out and I will be relieved I never said anything to him about it. Outside of this boring interlude I am having a pleasant birthday. It's a lovely northern New England autumn afternoon, I haven't written one word of the Phaeton poem, I deposited a paycheck in the bank (not an everyday occurrence), and I'm almost finished with the Robertson Davies novel I've been working on. Now if only I could escape from this Red Sox red tape.

Later I will go to Harmony's last soccer game of the season (though I am not forgetting tomorrow's thrilling parent-student debacle) and hope that the heroes will add a triumphant flourish to their so-far perfect season.

Too much sports talk in this entry, but you know how parents get trapped.

Information of possible interest to 2008 Frost Place teaching conference participants: Remember that poem "Occurrence on Washburn Avenue" by Regan Huff . . . the one about Alice who bowls a perfect game? Ted Kooser wants to feature it on American Life in Poetry. Alice will be famous! By the way the poem appears in the current Beloit Poetry Journal, if you want to take another look at it.

Ah, rejection letters. I sometimes wonder which is worse: preprinted form letters or cursory personal responses written by readers who show no sign of having asked themselves, "What's going on in this poem? What is the writer trying to do?" I have had poems castigated for being "too encoded" (what?) and "too self-absorbed" (about a piece that was obviously narrative fiction) and have even been told "don't be embarrassed to submit your work" (what?). Naturally I'd prefer to have readers like my poems and want to publish them. But I've submitted poems that I've later decided were bad or unfinished, and I understand that journal editors may have tastes that diverge from mine. So rejection per se is fine. What annoys me is rejection that only pretends to deal with the work at hand.

I'm on the editorial board of a poetry journal, so I have sympathy with editors. It's absolutely impossible to read a gargantuan stack of submissions with perfect care and sympathy. But resorting to these idiotic "personal" notes is useless and, for a self-doubting writer, downright destructive and cruel.

So when you're reading a student's creative work, ask those questions: "What's going on in this poem [or story or nonfiction piece]? What is the writer trying to do?" By and large, beginning writers aren't very cognizant of writing as a purposeful foray. The words just accrue on the page. By asking those initial questions, you open a door to a civil discourse about the piece. Now you can begin asking those great "what if" questions that can deal with anything from structural missteps to character development to punctuation and usage. The student is still in charge of the work, but you are offering insight into possibilities.

If a student is serious about wanting to be writer, she's going to get one of those stupid rejection letters some day. So teach her how to be a careful, considerate, focused critic of her own work. That way she has someone to depend on.

I've been in the zone this week, which is my friend Baron's term for those days when the words just keep coming and coming and coming. Fortunately I've also been unemployed so I really have spent five long, uninterrupted schooldays writing, wandering around the house, rolling out pie dough, writing some more, reading, eating cheese and crackers, walking in the woods with the dog, reading, writing some more, etc. It's the perfect schedule and tenable if one undertakes a career as a kept woman, but that is a job I have been able to swing only part time.

Today, if it stops being cloudy and raw, I will plant garlic and transplant kale into the greenhouse. Possibly I will write some more. I'm at a scary part of the Phaeton poem, when the boy loses control of the Sun's chariot, and it's easy to find something less fraught to do than detail a celestial car accident. This sounds flippant, but in fact immersing myself into these situations is very unpleasant. I can do it, I want to do it, I have to do it, I'm in the zone, but I don't like it. This is why writing is not therapy.

Dinner tonight: variety small pizzas decorated with various garden gleanings; spinach and lettuce salad; ice cream from the store because I'm just not in the mood to make another pie.

Rather accidentally I started reading aloud the opening lines of the Aeneid to my ten-year-old, and after two lines he was transfixed. This is a child who adores hero stories and spends considerable time wallowing in Greek and Norse mythology, so neither the story nor the characters were entirely new. But watching him reel back at the physical impact of the language, watching the story leap off the page and attack him . . . that was a heart-wrenching miracle.

In memoriam: Hayden Carruth

Though I never met, spoke, or wrote to Hayden Carruth--though he had, I'm sure, no inkling of my existence--I have had, in these years of fumbling my way into poetry, an attachment to him that has felt like love, like conversation, like an epistolary friendship. For me, he has been a living link with the true history of poetry--his yearnings and errors and delights and observations; the music of his lines and his language; his intensely personal engagement with literature; his swift comprehension of the wild beauty within our daily ugliness. His poems were magnificent risks. Sometimes they failed spectacularly. But at their best, they were songs that Keats, that Shakespeare, that Homer, that the Chinese poets might have understood.

from Late Sonnet

Hayden Carruth

And that I knew

that beautiful hot old man Sidney Bechet

and heard his music often but not what he

was saying, that tone, phrasing, and free play

of feeling mean more than originality,

those being the actual qualities of song.

Nor is it essential to be young.