First things first--Anyone who has read this poem will understand how exciting my news is: last night, the Harmony boys' basketball team beat the Athens's boys' basketball team in a nail-biter of an away game. As one of our 6th-graders said when he walked out into a lobby full of triumphant mothers waiting to drive their kids home, "This is like walking into a Hall of Fame!"

Second things second--Recently my sister and I learned that we both have oddly shaped optic nerves, which can be a sign of incipient glaucoma. And since glaucoma runs in families and our great-grandfather went blind from it, we have both been undergoing a battery of eye tests. Yesterday I finished my tests and was told so far, so good: in other words, no need to worry about turning into Milton yet. I'm sure all my amanuensi will be relieved to hear about this diagnosis.

And now, back to the books. . . .

The 2011 Frost Place programs have been announced, and I hope you'll visit the website and take a look at what's going on in Robert Frost's barn this summer. As all you regulars know, I am associate director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching; and in response to participant request, director Baron Wormser and I have spent this off-season tweaking the conference schedule. Basically, and yes, flatteringly, the teachers asked for more of us, so instead of having three visiting poets, we will now have two: Teresa Carson and Martha Carlson-Bradley. This change means that, on the last full day, Baron and I can return to the folding chairs at the front of the room and focus the day's session on ways to evaluate student poems and run a classroom writing workshop.

Already I have learned that several previous participants are planning to return this year. That's wonderful; and if you, too, are a previous participant, I hope you will consider attending again. Your presence and experience are enormously valuable to your colleagues. Moreover, each year's visiting poets offer new and individual approaches to poetry and the teaching process, and our workshop and evaluation component is evolving into a major element of the conference, which it had not been in the past.

If you have never attended and have questions, please do contact me, either here or through the Frost Place site. I'm sure many past participants would also be glad to get in touch with you and share their thoughts.

I've been spending time with Sylvia Plath lately. Fairly often I find myself rereading her collection Ariel, usually at moments when I feel as if I'm teetering on the knife-edge of an as yet unwritten poem. When it comes to poetry creation, I frequently have to endure the aura of "about to write." The sensation is not so different from an incipient migraine: something inarticulate is about to require language, yet I do not have a subject, not even a sound. I merely have an almost-imagined pressure, a near-invisible frame, a flickering. This might seem ridiculous, but so do the premonitions of illness seem petty; so do the signs of sudden, mutual, physical desire.

For me, reading Plath can be a way of shifting an embryo poem from its cavern into the articulated air. Between the terrible furor of her imagination and the stiletto precision of her language there remains, always, a palpable, vibrating cord. It is alive; its tremors are frightening. Here, for instance, is a stanza from "The Arrival of the Bee Box":

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not a Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

They can be sent back.

They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

"Furious Latin." "Box of maniacs." "Simply." Here is a poet who comprehends the infinitesimal powers of her grammatical elements. Without using a single unusual verb, she nonetheless composes a stanza that is crammed with frustrated energy. Reading Plath is, if nothing else, a lesson in the subtle ancient art of the modifier.

So this week I copied out Plath poem after Plath poem. I avoided all the famous hysterical ones: "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," etc.--those pieces in which topic overshadows linguistic substance. I didn't want the tabloid Plath; I wanted the poet. They are, of course, the same woman; but her legend often leads readers to cloak the drama of words with the drama of anecdote . . . as if the words themselves aren't her true sword and blood.

Yesterday was about as perfect a writing day as one could ask for: I read books, I copied poems, and then I spent hours and hours writing and revising a poem. And then, out of the blue, I received a royalty check in the mail: a very small check to be sure, but nonetheless proof that someone, somewhere, has actually purchased copies of my poetry collection.

And now here's an invitation from the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance--a response to our governor-elect's decision to cancel the poetry reading at tomorrow's inauguration. I live too far away so won't be able to attend, but maybe you can go to Portland and celebrate the power of poetry. Feel free to copy and send this to anyone else you know in Maine. Yes, the hearts are silly. But so what?

Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance invites you to

“I ♥ Maine Poetry”

Yes, this event is happening at the exact same time as the gubernatorial inauguration in Augusta: Wednesday, January 5 at 12PM.

Yes, this is a celebration not a protest.

Yes, we’ll be holding this event at one of the most obvious places in Maine to celebrate poetry: in front of the statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Longfellow Square, at the intersection of Congress Street and State Street in Portland.

Yes, there will be stickers.

Yes, we’d love for you to bring and read some of your favorite Maine poems, especially those by legends such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan. But please bring any poetry you’d like to!

Yes, we’d like you to forward this invitation to everyone you know. Now.

WHAT

I ♥ Maine Poetry
WHEN
Wednesday, January 5 at 12PM
WHERE
Longfellow Square
(intersection of Congress Street and State Street in Portland)
WHY
Because we owe the poets. Really.
FMI
info@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263

First new post of a new school week:

Insomnia, followed by a 5:30 alarm and strong coffee. Boys up and out, almost eagerly. Tom unloading a laundry basket, cleaning ashes out of the woodstove, brewing the strong coffee, listening sardonically to NPR, and now quietly cutting photo mats. Me: reading the poems of Milly Jourdain; resulting mood-ring-like response: hopelessness punctuated by positive thinking. As Melville says: "Well, boys, here's the ark!"

Today's activities include drinking more coffee; hauling a few 50-pound bags of feed out of the car, heaving them onto my shoulders, and lugging them gingerly over black ice to their destinations; copying out some of Wordsworth's Prelude because I'm dutiful; copying out several as-yet-unchosen Plath poems because I lay awake on the couch last night thinking about her dramatic control of the lyric; reading Moby-Dick because I'm actually in the mood for it; writing a few words of my Milton lecture; waiting for paying work to arrive in the mail; feeling guilty because it hasn't arrived even though I have no reason to feel guilty; watering houseplants; laundering sheets; writing a poem.

Here's today's Milly Jourdain poem, which is not at all like the poem I plan to write:

The Blackbird's Song

Milly Jourdain

Among the mists of dawn the blackbird sings

Of rivers running through the fields

And all the fresh young smell of growing things.

He tells of primroses in copses bare

Or clustered on the lonely banks

Breathing a finer fragrance in the air;

Of lilac blossom falling on the ground,

Of little winds and heavenly rain,

And summer nights whose breathing is a sound.

And when the light is spreading down below

He flies away from listeners,

Whose hearts he touched with what they do not know.

I plan to write a poem more like this one:

from The Pleasant Life in Newfoundland (1628)

Robert Hayman

To a worthy Friend, who often objects [to] the coldnesse of the Winter in Newfound-Land, and may serve for all those who have the like conceit.

You say that you would live in Newfound-land,

Did not this one thing your conceit withstand;

You feare the Winters cold, sharp, piercing ayre.

They love it best, that have once wintered there.

Winter is there, short, wholesome, constant, cleare,

Not thicke, unwholesome, shuffling, as 'tis here.

One of my favorite things about this poem is the variety of spellings of Newfoundland: in other sections it appears as "New-found-land" and, best of all, "Newfoundland-land." And if you follow the link to Hayman's biography, you can also read his "Reasons for the taking of Tobacco," which is an odd little discussion about the fine upstanding people who "drinke" it.

One good and/or bad thing about email is that it, unlike the U.S. Postal Service, recognizes no delivery holidays. Nonetheless, I was still rather surprised to receive an acceptance letter on New Year's Day. Happy, mind you. But surprised. Solstice is going to publish two poems, one of which I thought might be unpublishable, so that is particularly gratifying.

In other news, Tom, Paul, and I spent all afternoon filming a super-low-budget version of Godzilla. I started rereading Lampedusa's The Leopard. I made a chocolate cake (Julia Child's reine de saba); Tom made lasagna noodles; I made sauce. All day long we ate leftover meatballs from New Year's Eve. I snowshoed in melting snow. James spent the day holed up in his room like a real teenager, until the rest of us started watching a Marx Brothers' movie.

Dinner tonight: some sort of concoction involving red beans, leftover ham, and ancho peppers.

First sounds heard in 2011: simultaneous chorus of woodpecker, pulp truck, Tom's breathing, and refrigerator.

First Robert Louis Stevenson essay read in 2011: "On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places." Already this is in the running for best title of the year.

First beverages of 2011: icy well water followed by scalding French-pressed French roast.

First procrastination of 2011: doing barn chores and reading Moby-Dick. Some things never change.

First big question of 2011: Can I get this damp firewood to light? [Answer: yes.]

First regret of 2011: Oddly enough, I can't think of one yet. [Soon--very, very soon--this will change.]

First angry thought of 2011: Paul LePage, our governor-elect, has decided to nix the traditional inaugural poetry reading for "something a little more interesting." All right: to be honest I was mad about this yesterday in 2010. But I'm still mad.

First random quotation of 2011: From Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers: "I'm getting old. Soon I'll be thirty."

[Sigh.]

First writing project of 2011: A lecture on Milton for the Frost Place Advanced Poetry Seminar. Apparently, 2011 is the new 2009, at least in subject matter.

First wish for you in 2011: I think yesterday's "scattered details" wish is still as good as anything I else could hope for you. May they be plentiful and unexpected.