Steady rain and a warm southwest wind. Despite the bleak winter dark, the hour feels like April. I have been reading the letters of William Blake. He says to his friend:

I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you. My heart is full of futurity. I percieve that the sore travel which has been given me these three years leads to Glory & Honour. I rejoice & I tremble “I am fearfully & wonderfully made”. I had been reading the cxxxix Psalm a little before your Letter arrived. I take your advice. I see the face of my Heavenly Father he lays his Hand upon my Head & gives a blessing to all my works why should I be troubled why should my heart & flesh cry out. I will go on in the Strength of the Lord through Hell will I sing forth his Praises. that the Dragons of the Deep may praise him & that those who dwell in darkness & on the Sea coasts may be gatherd into his Kingdom. Excuse my perhaps too great Enthusiasm.

Rain and rain and rain. All the colors have been washed from the sky, the trees, the roofs, but the grass glows like a bed of emeralds in the misty half-light. My heart is full of futurity. Excuse my perhaps too great Enthusiasm. A car flies by, hissing, invisible beyond the trees. The sky is a clouded mirror. The grass swallows rain. I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you, but I cannot say any of them.

This afternoon I'll be leading my first school workshops of the season: two 9th-grade classes at a local high school. I've decided to take the classic Baron Wormser approach (dictation) and to work with Czeslaw Milosz's poem "Encounter," which is an interesting case: a poem written in Polish but translated into English by the poet. One of the classes has been memorizing Frost poems, so I thought I'd take up the subject of Frost's crabbiness about free versifiers by making the students copy out a free verse poem. Unfortunately both classes are very short, so we won't have much time to write; but I'm hoping that in at least one of them I'll get a chance to use this prompt, based on the Milosz stanzas:

Think back to something that happened yesterday.

Now write a 4-stanza poem.

Stanza 1: Say what you are doing.

Stanza 2: Say what you see.

Stanza 3: Say what you remember.

Stanza 4: Ask a question.

You have 5 minutes to write.

Yes, yes, yes, I am still alive. Merely I have been driving and driving and talking and driving and eating and driving and washing dishes and driving. But finally I am alone in my house and back at my desk.

When I got home last night, I discovered that yet another journal, Hawk and Handsaw, had accepted every single western Pennsylvania poem I'd submitted. Moreover, the editor asked for more. I can't tell you how pleased I am to see that these poems do, in fact, seem to make sense to their readers. The style and approach are so new to me, and I've also been suffering under a sense of imminent divorce . . . which is to say that I've had to consciously force myself not to work on the series because of looming editorial and anthology deadlines. With poems, as with love affairs, "too busy" can lead to "never again." So knowing that two journals plan to take a total of eight or ten Chestnut Ridge poems is heartening.

Now, however, I ought to be addressing those looming editorial and anthology deadlines.

Don't worry: I haven't vanished, merely been too surrounded by people to write. I will offer the following words, however, and you can fill in the blanks:

African violets.

Pileated woodpecker holes.

Bacon.

Coffee.

Coffee.

Coffee.

Ice skates.

Beagle.

Grace Kelly.

Scotch.

Snow snow snow, and we are going nowhere fast. It's actually quite lovely. Last night, insomnia released its hold over me, and I slept from 11 to 7 without waking up even once. And now here I sit, while the boys loll in their blankets and the snow falls and falls. Tomorrow we'll drive to Vermont; today we'll sit beside the fire and drink coffee and, eventually, discuss the thorny issue of college applications. But for the moment, the washing machine is doing all the work.

I want to thank you for the comments you sent me about the poem draft I posted a few days ago. They were helpful, but they also uniformly agreed with what I had already guessed would probably need to happen, which is both reassuring and, paradoxically, why I rarely ask anyone anything about work in progress. I've never belonged to a writers' group, and I don't go to workshops anymore because they so often become competitions, excoriations, back patting, praise parties, or hand holding, none of which I want. During the two years I worked with Baron Wormser as a private student, I relied heavily on his suggestions; but one of the wonders of Baron's teaching is his ability to wean his students from dependency on advice. He taught me, as much anything, how to use my own resources to become my own teacher.

This isn't to say that my poems can't benefit from an outside eye, but, after all, the work must come from me, from beginning to end. Regarding the draft you saw, there are elements I don't care to excise but that require excision. Probably those excisions will lead to additions. The piece will change, perhaps radically. What I like best about the draft is, I think, the tone; and I believe that undertaking a faux-translation allowed me to ride the fluidity of that voice as I composed the narrative. Probably the Italian has done its work. I should imagine it as a bread casing, the sort that one makes to envelope a ham for baking but that is not intended to be eaten. Why does all the food need to go into the same mouths? It's not a waste to feed the scraps to the hens.

Along with everyone else in the northeast, I am wasting my coffee hour trying to reconfigure our Thanksgiving plans. Suddenly we are facing 11 inches of snow for tomorrow-- not ideal weather for driving across both the White Mountains and the Green Mountains. This, combined with kennel reservations an hour north and a dog-stitch-removal appointment a half-hour south, is accumulating into a headache. I hope we can drive on Thanksgiving Day, but perhaps we will end up spending the holiday here, watching the snow fall while eating four pounds of cranberry relish.

In the meantime, I'll be doing 100 pounds of laundry and reading something or other.

I forgot to remind you that it's time to make Emily Dickinson's Black Cake. I'll be glad to forward the recipe, if you're interested. I also forgot to tell you that, one of these days, both the recipe and my chatter about its history will appear in a Tupelo Press poets' cookbook edited by Kurt Brown. I wonder what else will be in there. All I got was an email from Kurt, whom I've never met, asking me to submit a recipe. Naturally Black Cake came to mind, but I also started thinking about other poet-cooks.

In Her Husband, biographer Diane Middlebrook wrote about how Sylvia Plath obstinately worked her way through The Joy of Cooking during the early months of her marriage to Ted Hughes. If I remember correctly, they were living in a hut (in Spain, perhaps?), and meanwhile Sylvia wrestled with lemon meringue pie and other 1950s American delights. I found the tale disturbing, touching, and characteristic. Also familiar.

I cook; therefore I am.

or

I cook; therefore I am ________ .

[useful]

[lovable]

[resourceful]

[worth staying married to]