We got another little burst of snow overnight, no more than a coating, but still it's hard to be enthusiastic.

Cold, grim, gray . . . this has been a classic Maine April. It's a good thing I love my wood stove so much, or I might be a little downhearted. But the crocuses are doughty, the scilla is blue, the songbirds insist. If they can hack the lousy weather, so can I.

Yesterday I finished annotating student poems, prepped teaching plans for next week, copyedited a chapter,  burrowed into The Wings of the Dove. Today, more editing, then errands to run, then my evening writing group. I feel and sound boring but such is quotidian life.

If you happen to be in southern Maine on Saturday, I'll be reading at the South Portland Library at 2 p.m. with Marita O'Neill and David Stankiewicz. If you happen not to be in southern Maine, I've still got a few spaces open in my May 3 zoom class: only $75 for a full day of writing and conversation, which I'm realizing is dirt cheap compared to what other venues are charging. I recently saw a class advertised at $200 for two hours, which honestly I find a little shocking. Who can afford that? And how can you possible get $200's worth of writing done in two hours?

Apparently this is why I stay poor.

I've always struggled with the late novels of Henry James. His early and midcareer novels are old friends: What Maisie Knew, for instance, and especially Portrait of a Lady. But the three massive novels at the end of his career--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl--have always beaten me. I try one or the other of them, and within twenty pages I give up in bewilderment.

Until this week. This morning I am thrilled to report that finally, at the age of sixty, I appear to have learned how to read a late James novel. I have been working away at The Wings of the Dove for two days now, and I'm following the plot, I can tell all of the players apart, I'm impressed and moved by the depth of the characterization, and I am easily unwinding the circuitry of the sentences. All I can think is that my years of training on Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, Iris Murdoch, and Ivy Compton-Burnett has finally paid off.

Yesterday I got a big chunk of my student annotations done, and maybe I'll be able to finish the rest today, or maybe not. I've got to work on class plans, too, and copyedit, of course . . . the day spills over with obligation. But I'll go for a long walk first and try to clear my head of the Henry James wool. He is a great writer, but also an insinuating one. His sentences invade.

I think I might make a homemade Greek pizza for dinner tonight. I think I might do some dusting this afternoon. I think I might reread Coleridge's "Lime-Tree Bower" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" to try to figure out why they sort of sound like the same poem. I think I'll carry up some firewood from the basement, and fold laundry, and mutter over the poem drafts I wrote this weekend.

Descriptions of my days always sound like nothing and everything. I can never decide if I'm lazy or overzealous. 

Robins are twittering hysterically in the wet darkness. If April equals 40 degrees and snowmelt, so be it. A Maine songbird does her best with what she has to work with.

Today I'm going to take a small hiatus from editing and turn my thoughts to student work--annotating my high schoolers' final projects and visiting my friend Gretchen's third-grade physical theater class. Then, in the afternoon, I'll turn my thoughts to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the weekend I finished rereading Roth's American Pastoral, then took a small breather with Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddie's, and now I have plunged into Henry James's The Wings of the Dove--though my old paperback turns out to be so dangerously fragile that I fear I may have to buy an emergency replacement.

I wrote four new poems over the weekend, along with those writers' essays I inflicted on you, and my brain is pinging with images and words. Meanwhile, I mop and vacuum and wander among the cemetery alleys and fold towels and stack dishes and play cribbage and stare out the window and talk to a son on the phone and listen to baseball and.

In the midst of life my friend Angela texts me, "Fucking shit, girlfriend, we haven’t shied away from the abyss." I text back, "No we haven’t! I call that success."

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.