If you happen to be in central Maine this coming week, please remember that the conference readings are free and open to the public: Maudelle Driskell reads on July 7, I read on July 8, Teresa Carson reads on July 10, all at 7 p.m. at Tenney House (47 Tenney Road), the first Monson Arts building on the left as you come around the curve into town from the south. Teresa and Maudelle have never read in Maine before, and they are ambitious poets and tremendous human beings, and I urge you to see one or both of them if you can. The staff is working on a livestream option, and I will keep you posted on whether or not that will be available.

In other goings-on: this is the cover photo for Calendar, my forthcoming poetry collection. I published my first book just before I turned 40, and now at nearly 60, I am publishing my tenth, which is amazing to me. Twenty hard years of writing. How did I ever do it? I have no idea. This is Tom's photo, of course--a portrait of the top of our Harmony driveway during spring mud season. The puddles look like serene ponds but are actually car-destroying potholes. That could be a general metaphor for life in the woods.

Today: housework, yardwork, laundry, errand running. I want to get to the fish market to buy picked crab for tomorrow's crab cakes. I need to get a stain out of a dress. The weather up north will be sultry, but no doubt also buggy, and probably cool at night and maybe rainy now and again, so packing will be complex, as it always was for the Frost Place. The rural north loves extremes. With a big lake right outside my cabin, there's also water to be considered. I'm not much of a swimmer, but on a hot afternoon I might be a dabbler, and maybe there will be kayaks or canoes, which are more in my line. 

It's odd heading out to a place that is both known (I teach kids in Monson and used to live 20 miles down the road) and unknown (I've never spent so much time in town; I've never taught there in the summer; I've never led the conference there). I hope the days will go well; I think they will. But I also don't quite know what to expect, especially around the edges.

Yesterday was washing coats, washing sweaters, washing windows, plus running errands, scrawling packing lists, checking in with faculty and participants. Another thing I did was yank out the weary peavines, so this morning, before the heat kicks in, I'll be out in the garden sowing kale seed in the bare patch. Mid-morning: a haircut appointment, and then home to tackle more window washing and list scrawling.

Amid the flurry I tinkered with a poem revision and I finished reading Everett's James. Then, last night, I slipped Jackson Bate's biography of Keats off the shelf, so that's what I'm musing over at the moment, though I don't know if I'll make it all the way through the tome on this rereading. It is, without doubt, my favorite literary biography, but I'm not sure it's quite the thing for lakeside rest after the rigors of a poetry-teaching day. Yet it might be. Books are surprising.

Temperatures cooled off last night, so now balmy air wafts through the open windows, the birds sing furiously, and a first finger of sunlight cuts through the flat dawn sky. It's been a bad news week, and I continue to strenuously avoid the poisons of my phone. But venom leaks out all the same. 

I am trying hard to live in the present tense, to be aware of my body in the world, to attend to my mind and my responsibilities, to make room for idleness and vigor. Anything to keep worry, that incubus, at bay. Anxiety is my least productive habit: it consumes so much time and strength, and it is 100 percent useless.

And I will need all of my strength for the teaching conference, where everyone else's anxiety will be in top gear, where poems will start fires that cannot be quenched, where feelings will be pulsing and raw. Of course, box of tissues is one of the items scrawled on my list. Every year at the conference people cry and cry. But this year I might need two boxes.

"So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped."

                                                      --Louise Erdrich, "Shamengwa"

* * *

Over the weekend I finished reading Erdrich's story collection The Red Convertible and began reading Percival Everett's James, which I'd tried to take out from the library months ago and which finally arrived last week after I'd entirely forgotten about it. Now that I'm living in a home filled with clean and airy shelves, I am happy to be starting a new novel that I don't immediately have to find space for, a book that will return from whence it came.

The spring cleaning (summer cleaning?) continues around here: yesterday I finally finished the kitchen--all of the cupboards and drawers washed out and reorganized, the refrigerator scrubbed, the closet vacuumed. Next up: windows and winter woolens and coats. Jeesh, a housewife's work is never done.

"Deformed by my art." I am still fidgeting with that notion . . . not the deformed part so much as the art part, which is a term that I find porous and inexact, at least as regards my own life. Am I more of a poet than I am a teacher or a cook or a gardener or even a striving partner to my beloved? I don't know how to answer that question. Last week, during our Rockland workshop, Gretchen emphasized the term maker. In her view, this wording was a way to take ourselves off the hot seat. We don't have to be artists. We can simply rest in the present-tense of creating whatever it is we are creating at the moment. I take her point, but also . . . I want to be an artist. I am an artist. I obsess over the making. The making thickens over time. I overflow with the making. I cannot contain it. But what is being shaped?

As for being deformed. Well, I can offer physical proof of that. When I put my hands together, I can see that all of the fingers on my left hand are notably longer than the fingers on my right hand . . . at least half an inch longer. They are also all crooked, all of them curved out of shape. This is the result of extreme instrument practice at a very young age. The bones of my left hand grew around the neck of a violin.

And yet I did not write violin on my litany of art. I don't know where to put it. I don't know where or how one art changes into another; I don't know to track the influence of my own making. It is all so complicated.