Yesterday I posted a new Poetry Kitchen class, this one on revision, a subject I've actively been rethinking and trialing in my work at Monson Arts. The usual revision-teaching approach is the workshop model, in which participants share new work that the teacher and classmates then critique. I call this the Joan-of-Arc-tied-to-a-stake model of revision teaching. The class flings advice, and the poet silently endures the assault.

There are numerous problems with this approach. Even if we set aside the poet's feelings of anxiety and fear and stupidity (and why should we set them aside? why should anyone have to be hazed like this?), we end up with a teaching model that depends on sorting through a barrage of exterior advice rather than one that enhances the poet's ability to see and judge their own work clearly and vigorously. If we want to teach poets to become confident, independent, and clear-sighted, the workshop model is clearly an inadequate method for doing so.

Plus, I hate it. I hate being the flinger of advice. I hate having advice flung at me. Why should I reinforce this terrible pattern in my classes or my own writing life?

During last year's high school sessions at Monson Arts, I experimented with some new ways of teaching revision, and at the Conference on Poetry and Learning I shared them with the participants, using experiential activities so that we all got to feel the difference in approach. Afterward Teresa said, "You should start offering plain old revision classes to practicing poets via this model." And so, voila, I have created a new Poetry Kitchen session that does exactly that.

"Revision Intensive: Trusting Yourself" is a two-day class, held November 9 and 10 on Zoom, that centers around my belief that we need to intensify our own engagement with our in-process poems rather than rely primarily on the external advice of instructors or classmates. While a supportive community can be wonderfully uplifting, in the end we each need to depend on our own instincts, our own engagement with the art and our material.

Via a series of exercises, discussions, and writing prompts, the class will focus on showing participants how to see their poems-in-progress clearly and usefully. It will help them learn to trust their ability to make exciting and productive decisions about revision and to distinguish between useful suggestions and destructive ones. The goal is to give participants the skills and confidence to move their poems forward into new forms.

This approach was spectacularly successful in the classroom last year, and it was also well received at the conference. It is, essentially, exactly how I approach revision in my own poems. Merely, I figured out a way to frame it for sharing. A note: Even if you attended the conference, this class might be useful for you as it will be focusing directly on you and your poems, not you as a teacher or a purveyor of poetry. This is a class for writers-in-progress.

FYI, at the moment there's still plenty of space in the class, but my October Poetry Kitchen offering is now completely full. So you might want to snag a spot soon, if you're interested. The cost is $150.

Rain again this morning, and in the wet darkness a Carolina wren urges tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle, tea. I didn't sleep very well last night, and this morning I'm not bleary exactly but a bit brittle.

I spent much of yesterday drafting an essay I don't like, one that I'll probably abandon on account of its dull thinking but that, subject-wise, is still niggling at me. I never know if these false leads are useful or a waste of time. And I write so few essays these days that prose-work itself is mystifying. I can't call the day a failure, given that I cranked out a lot of sentences, but it wasn't a transcendent one by any means. I wrote an awkward draft about an awkward topic, and I never found the portal.

On the bright side I did get rid of the weird smell in the dishwasher.

Today I'll bake a peach cobbler, and I'll walk down to the farmers' market in search of new potatoes, and in the evening I'll go out to my poetry group. Maybe that essay will decide to be written; but, if so, it will have to do a lot of nagging to make me take it seriously.

I'm still poring over "Grecian Urn," though, and I've been thinking about Hopkins's notions of inscape and instress. In an article in Commonweal, Anthony Domestico explains:

Hopkins coined the terms inscape and instress to describe the overflowing presence of the divine within the temporal. Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being; instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink.

I feel these distinctions more than I understand them intellectually, perhaps because, for me, they are elements of the process of moving from inarticulate sensation into the framing of language. I daresay they also have some connection to why I'm presently writing good poems and bad prose.

I worked in my study all morning and then, around noon, ventured out to Target to look for new pillowcases (ours are suddenly disintegrating). For some reason, the place was packed with Canadians--Quebecois license plates everywhere, hundreds of vacationing families chattering in French . . . I wondered if I'd accidentally crossed an international border instead of driven 15 minutes to South Portland. It was all very surprising but exciting, too, and I came home with my pillowcases feeling as if I'd been on a small adventure by accident, though nothing had actually happened except for being surrounded by a language I understand only haltingly.

It's all ear work, though . . . poetry all morning, singing along to my favorite playlist in the car, and then standing in line behind the inscrutable grievances of French-speaking children. "Tout le monde [something or other]!" one teenager kept admonishing her father. "Tout le monde!" And he, avoiding her eye, stared down into his cart, which contained twelve half gallons of bottled water and nothing else.

I woke this morning to another small spat of rain, but it seems to have stopped now. We got more than an inch yesterday--very good news for the garden--and I think the day will be fairly cool. Maybe today will be the day I wear a long-sleeved shirt for the first time in weeks. I should do some weeding in the beds along the lane, pull out bolting lettuce and arugula, sow another round of salad greens. I've got more work to do on the sheaf of poems I've been combing through, more notes to jot down about "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (which I've now copied out three times, and will probably copy out a few more times before Teresa and I meet . . . oh, what I'm learning about repetition and metrical disruption! This poem is a master class in sound.)

A light rain is pattering down, and the air is thick with damp. I am hoping for a long day of showers. Southern Maine has had very little moisture lately, and my gardens are thirsty.

Yesterday was crammed with chores and obligations, but today will be quieter--exercising on my mat and then poem revision and poem study in the morning; probably running an errand or so in the afternoon. I'm still waiting for the next big editing project to arrive; when it does, my days will realign around it. But for the moment my time is my own, and my brain is full of poetry. 

It feels good to step into a writing day with the house scrubbed and tidy, towels and sheets freshly laundered, gardens thriving and bright, and a soft rain tapping at the windows. The house is my canvas, the house is my muse: this was true in the woods, and now it's true by the sea. All of my work as a maker arises from the small spaciousness of home.

Now the rain is falling harder. The kitchen clock ticks, and lamps glow in the weak daylight.

I am a poet and I write poems. That may sound like an obvious statement, but of course all of you writers know that such statements are fraught with fear and wistfulness, hope and procrastination, wrong-headed bumbling and self-destructive showmanship . . . to name merely a few of the abstractions lurking inside our Pandora's box.

I think my house helps me write because it soothes my senses. I love the yellow paint on the dining-room wall, the blue chairs in my study. I love the bindings of the books, the well-dusted corners of the wooden floors, the plumped-up cushions on the shabby couch. I love the bright glass window of the wood stove, the hum of the washing machine in the basement, the scent of sourdough rising in a red bowl, the single coral-colored blossom poised in a pale blue bottle. Nothing is grand. But my body reaches out to these small pleasures; they make me attend, they make me listen to the cadence of my thoughts. And the cadence is where the poems begin.

Weeks have elapsed since I've worn anything long-sleeved, but this morning I am considering the possibility. The air is downright cool--the first time it's been in the 50s since my return from Monson. The neighborhood is extremely quiet, no hint yet of Monday bustle, other than the crows yawping in the maples.

I have a long list of this-n-thats to deal with today . . . watering the garden, an early morning walk with a friend, a wrestle with an editing project, then mopping and vacuuming, washing sheets and towels, grocery-shopping, mailing a birthday package to my son, and so on and so forth.

But at least I caught up on a lot of yard work yesterday--all of the mowing, most of the trimming (until the trimmer died), deep weeding of the back gardens while T chain-sawed up the pile of deadwood the arborist left us. And I caught up with Keats also--a first pass through "Grecian Urn," which I'll probably copy out at least twice more to really pull myself into it.

I am still not reading the news, but it finds me nonetheless, spreading like a virus.

The nights have been cooler, no air machine roaring, and now, in the gray first light, a vague breeze trembles through the open windows. I'm glad to report that I slept better this morning--not late by any means but at least I wasn't awake before 4 a.m. I feel rested, happy to be drinking my small cup of coffee, comfortable in my skin.

I spent the first third of yesterday's daylight in the garden, weeding all of the front beds, pruning out overgrown herbs, deadheading blossoms, watering. Then I scrubbed the dirt off myself and turned to the big bread-making project that's been absorbing my attention this week: a five-day-long Danish rye extravaganza involving a buttermilk and rye starter that ferments for 72 hours, staggered additions of raw rye kernels, more overnight fermentations, and, today, a very slow rise and bake. There's no kneading involved, just a giant bowl of fragrant, bubbling batter. I'm quite excited about it.

To celebrate our anniversary, T and I decided to go into town and wander among the vintage stores--ostensibly to find a little birthday tchotchke to mail to our son but mostly because we enjoy poking through other people's weird stuff. We ate a big late lunch at Empire Chinese, came home for a nap, and then puttered around the house for the rest of the evening. It was a pleasant, unfussy day.

This morning I'll do more outside work before the heat kicks back in--mowing and trimming, some backyard weeding. I'll get the mysterious and exciting rye bread into the oven. Maybe I'll grocery-shop, or maybe I'll procrastinate on that till tomorrow.

In the meantime, Teresa and I have decided to take a detour before we hurl ourselves back into the 17th-century poets: we're going to veer into the romantics and undertake Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." My plan is to copy out the poem word for word, and I am itching to get started. All of that factual Danish-rye talk might as well be a metaphor for my life in poetry during the past couple of weeks. Fermentation is underway and I am bubbling over.

 It is Saturday at 4:30 a.m.-- not much daylight yet, but the birds are singing hard, and I am trying to enjoy them. I'm up early because I had a vivid dream about my friend Jilline. Though she has been dead for nearly 20 years, she regularly haunts me; and last night's dream was wrenching in its simplicity . . . walking together down a New York City street, as we did so often in real life; idle talk about clothes; the plainness of our bond, none of the "how I long to be an artist" emoting that we also did so often in real life . . . this time just two friends in their summer dresses, window-shopping.

Today is my 33rd wedding anniversary, and perhaps that's why Jilline was visiting me again. On the hot morning that Tom and I got married, she rose from her seat, statuesque and hilarious in the prim confines of that old Friends meetinghouse. She winked at me from across the room, then read a passage from Paradise Lost, complex and gorgeous and heartfelt but also a private joke between us, given my not-yet-come-to-terms-with-Milton crabbiness in those days. She teased my dad at the reception, and they kept slipping ice cubes down one another's collar. Years tumbled by and she sat with me beside a lake with my firstborn son and told me that my new baby looked like Edward G. Robinson. She stood at the rail of a New York ferry and pointed out the Statue of Liberty to my secondborn son. Later, in his excitement, he drew a map of the city in which Jilline loomed just as tall as the Lady with the Lamp. She wandered the Roman ghetto with me and she wise-cracked with Italian guys in her New Jersey mobster accent and she worshipped with me at the tomb of Keats. She wrote me letter upon letter upon letter, none of which I've been able to bring myself to reread. And then, quite suddenly, she was dead.

I didn't expect to enter today with such a burst of melancholy. Yet despite the sadness, I am always glad to meet Jilline in my dreams. She was the friend who taught me to see my desperate need to make art as part of the comedy of being human. She showed me how to work, and she made me understand that being an artist means being alive in the moment . . . and then she died.

Yet the alive stays alive in her hauntings. Today I have been married for 33 years. Jilline, if she were in the world, would be on the phone, singing some goofy 1950s nightclub song to us. A dress would arrive in the mail--a bargain from T. J. Maxx that she has decided will look perfect on me. She appears without warning, rushes through the door in a cloud of cheap tulle, leaving lipstick stains on Tom, declaiming Shakespeare, carrying on, making a scene, hogging the spotlight, loving us madly.

When you live long enough, your ghosts start throwing their own parties. And you have to go. You can't decide to stay home and turn in early, even though you know the ghosts will make you stay up all night and someone downstairs will call the cops on account of the noise.

Afterward, sleepless, you wander home through the grimy eloquent streets. An early-morning train squeals its brakes, and a pair of pigeons flutters up from their roost on a fire escape. The air smells of grit and all-night diners, and the soles of your shoes echo on the pavement.