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.

Home again, and glad to be here. But my class yesterday was so pleasant--kids working hard and with enthusiasm, choosing and typing up their final pieces for display. Though I always give everyone the option to focus on prose, this year's kids seem primarily to be writing poems, and they've got scads of drafts to sift through and think over. And they really do think: it is heartwarming to watch twelve kids studying their notebooks so intensely. We've got one more class to refine their final drafts--titles, punctuation, sound--and  then, essentially, our year is done--just one last session, which will probably be a create-your-own-script and-performance-from-start-to-finish whizbanger, a guaranteed day of silliness.

This morning I'll go out for a fast walk; then I'll work at my desk, eventually get a haircut, and this evening my poetry group will meet to see Terrance Hayes read at the University of Southern Maine. I'm happy to watch him, but I am sad we won't be writing tonight: I've missed the group for two weeks in a row, and I'm eager to get my habits back on track.

I've started rereading Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which is a difficult and dense and painful book that feels right to me just now. I may turn to Henry James next: apparently I am longing for complication.

Meanwhile, the weather shivers. Our snow has melted, but the air stays cold and there's more snow in the forecast for the weekend. Spring in Maine is a bouquet of dashed hopes. But I love it anyway.

Last night during dinner the air suddenly filled with fat white flakes, like a blizzard of torn paper, dense and eloquent, the most beautiful of snows.

Oh, the grandeur of the north, even as mud season looms.

There we were, eating a Thanksgiving dinner in March, while the snow whirled and the cookstove clicked.

Do you see why I miss this place?

It snowed yesterday--the sort of garbagy, slush-from-the-sky, late March clipper that depresses all hopes. Thank goodness for a wood stove: without a fire to soothe my eyes, I would have been dismal indeed. Now this morning a hard crust coats every tulip leaf, every lilac bud. I know the ice will melt away under sunlight, but for the moment winter is strutting around the ring while spring sobs in the corner with a black eye.

This afternoon I'll be driving north into the homeland, where winter really is still king. But despite the weather, the school year is rolling toward the finish line. I've only got three classes left with my high schoolers, and we need to get cracking on our final projects. The days have whipped by: I feel like I've barely gotten to know these kids, and now they're flying away from me. That is always the story of teaching.

So this morning I'll pull myself together for travel. Yesterday I finished my weekly house chores, edited a couple of chapters, went for a fast walk in the pre-storm chill. I read about Paris and pored over the paintings of Sargent. I drank many cups of ginger tea and baked a chicken potpie. Two weeks ago I drove north feeling like I'd been drained by a vampire. I may not be writing good poems at the moment, but at least I've got blood in my veins again.

I think, possibly, maybe, that I'm almost feeling like myself again. I had a busy, physical weekend, but I didn't take one single nap, and I got a lot more accomplished than I thought I would. I cleared leaves, ripped up the stones in my garden paths, made bread, scrubbed bathrooms. I hung around admiring Tom as he built two new garden boxes, which he'll install next weekend. We watched Cooper Flagg, our central Maine basketball star, propel Duke to the Sweet Sixteen. We ate a giant meal of lamb burgers, fried onions and peppers, homemade buns, potato salad, roasted green beans, and feta, followed by blueberry flan. I slept all night. And now it is Monday morning, and I do not feel like a damp rag.

I'll be on the road tomorrow and teaching in Monson on Wednesday, but today I'll be home--editing, finishing up my weekly housework chores, catching up on reading projects, maybe transplanting shrubs, if the wind isn't too vicious.

I've been reading about the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune--not a heartening history at any time, certainly not in our current state of chaos. But I'm also realizing how many great artists found their metiers in the years surrounding these disasters--painters such as Sargent and Cassatt, for instance.

The work goes on. The work requires us.

 "Our life really is a haunted one. The simplest thing in it is a mystery, the invisible world always lies round us like a shadow."

                                                                               --Harriet Beecher Stowe

**

For the first time this season, I spent most of my day in the yard--clearing leaves, bagging sticks, pruning shrubs, transplanting spinach. Tom was outside, too, beginning work on the new garden boxes he's building from scavenged boards. This means disruption: I've got to pull up most of the slate paths I've laid so we can accommodate the new design. And then I'll have to buy a giant pile of fresh soil and toil for hours filling the vast new containers. But the end result will be both more beautiful and more utilitarian, so the fuss is worth it.

Every year I am amazed at how much work it takes to keep this tiny city plot in cultivation. How ever did we manage 40 acres, two babies, and a barnful of animals? "The simplest thing . . . is a mystery."

Thanks to a day spent crouching and stooping and lifting, I am embracing the satisfactory ache of my gardening muscles this morning. It's funny: I am active all winter--working on my mat, trudging through the neighborhood--but gardening requires a particular combination of leg and back and arm and shoulder muscles that my winter upkeep regimen doesn't seem to touch. Gardening isn't just puttering among the flowers; it's real physical work . . . lugging rocks, digging holes, shoving wheelbarrows. But I am always glad to feel my body rising to the challenge, especially this year, after having been sick for so long.

Today will be cooler than yesterday, and will warm up more slowly. And I've got house and grocery chores to deal with as well, so I may not get much done outside. But I will start prying up the paths, and I might transplant a couple of elderberry shrubs. I cannot resist the carillon of spring.

Yesterday's convention presentation went well. We had maybe 50 teachers in our session, far more than I expected, and they seemed excited by the dictation/writing prompt/revision prompt strategies that Marita and I were offering. Now we'll see if that leads to any new signups for the Monson conference. I have hopes: some of the participants were pretty excited about what it felt like to play around with revision in this way.

But now it's Saturday, which means I can temporarily stop thinking about such matters. The weather will be cool but clear, and when the air warms up a bit I will get myself outside into the gardens and continue my leaf-removal tasks. I'll transplant spinach, and Tom and I will plan our new garden boxes, and in the kitchen a vat of chicken stock will simmer on the stove, and in the maples the cardinals will whistle and chortle, and I am looking forward to this day.

March has been relatively quiet for me, but April is shaping up to be crazy town. On April 5, I'll be reading at the South Portland Library. Then T and I will steal the following weekend to head to Mount Desert Island for our biannual cottage retreat. On April 19 I'll be teaching a Poetry Kitchen class. On April 25 I'll be going out to dinner with the poet Natalie Diaz (!). On April 26 I'll be taking a workshop with Diaz, listening to her read, and participating in an onstage conversation with Betsy Sholl about our work. And of course I'll be teaching in Monson and working on an editing project and mentoring a student book manuscript in the midst of all this. . . .

So a quiet weekend at home feels especially sweet. 

A steady rain is rattling down, one of those long slow all-day rains that gardens love. So no outside work today, maybe not even a walk. Instead, it will be a tuck-into-my-shell morning, mostly spent at my desk editing a snarl of legal footnotes. And then after lunch I'll doll myself up in a new dress and head downtown to the MCELA convention, where I'll be giving a presentation on revision, and hanging around the Monson Arts table hawking my programs, and otherwise behaving like a poet who is not curled under a turtle shell.

I've started reading a book I found on the street, David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a study of nineteenth-century travels to the City of Light. I've never been to Paris myself (outside of the airport), but I've certainly read lots of Henry James, so I'm finding the book more interesting than I expected . . . poignant, too--the way in which Americans, in all our raw brashness, can be suddenly toppled by awe. Who knows if we will ever be that wide-eyed nation again?

There was a scattering of rain overnight: I see dampness glistening under the streetlights, hear roof drip ticking against the vents. The shower is surely lifting the spirits of the greening plants I've been releasing from last fall's matted leaves. I've still got much more to do in that regard, but there's no rush. A little rain, a little sun, a little more rain, a little more sun. My leaf chore is the least important task.

But it's been tonic to be outside, bending and stooping and lifting and carrying. It's been good to unfold my wintered-over muscles, to start living in my senses again. And I get such extreme pleasure from these early blooms: the crocuses, the snowdrops, so doughty and delicate, so tough and translucent.

The big new editing project did arrive yesterday, so today I'll be back to a regular desk schedule. I'll walk first, then slide myself into my work hours. I'll go out to write in the evening. I'll be a plain useful citizen  of the word.

Workwise, this has been a quieter week than I thought it would be, mostly because the new editing project that was supposed to arrive on Monday still hasn't made an appearance. I've filled the time with a smaller editing assignment and high school class planning, and yesterday I started two new poem drafts. I haven't written anything else in the weeks since I've started being sick, so that was a good sign: my brain is trying out a few dance steps again. Then, in the afternoon, I unearthed the wheelbarrow and began clearing leaves out of garden beds, another promising sign. Looks like maybe I won't be ill forever.

I expect the new editing project will arrive today, but till then I've got to make my own work. I'll mess with those poem drafts, read some Coleridge and Wordsworth, go for a walk. I'll clear leaves out of garden beds, hang laundry, roast a chicken. My connections to daily life still feel strangely air-brushed, but I'm drifting back into the blunt quotidian. I guess it's a good week to be underemployed. Still, I'd best be back to normal by Friday, when I've got to give a presentation in front of a pack of English teachers at the MCELA convention. Wish me luck.

What a wet day we had yesterday! It was a real spring rain, heavy and warm, and I am eager to hustle outside this morning to see what it has coaxed forth. Already I glimpse patches of purple and yellow crocuses budding up in the front gardens, a snowdrop lifting its head out back. With such a start, even a wobbly ray of sun will unfold wonders.

I am sick of being sick. Whatever ails me has been clinging like a burr, but slowly my energy is returning. I mopped and vacuumed and cleaned bathrooms yesterday, edited a 50-page academic article, behaved more or less like a person who can get things done. Today I'll work on class plans for my high schoolers, get the grocery shopping done, read Wordsworth and Coleridge, maybe start my next editing project if I receive it early enough in the day, maybe do some raking if the yard has dried out and I haven't gone limp. At least I'm not on the road this week and can collapse in the afternoons if I need to.

Monday morning, pouring rain, T is bustling off to work, P is bustling back to NYC, and an hour from now I will have dropped him off at the bus station, I will be stepping back into a quiet house, into my solitary hours, with the rain falling falling, gray daylight unfolding over the streets, my thoughts bumping up against themselves, the unsaid, velvet and thorns.

Yesterday was an annoying day as I ended up in the emergency room because of chest pain. Do not panic; I am fine. But when you're 60 years old and you're talking to medical personnel while trying to figure out ongoing weirdness, each symptom you mention sounds like incipient heart attack. And thus there we were: sent to the ER for tests. It's good and relieving news to know that every single one came back as normal, but I do not want to see the bill for this, and I'm still no clearer about what the hell with my ongoing floating rib-cage pain. All I can assume is some kind of virus. But at least everyone is now confident that I'm not about to drop dead.

Anyway, enough of that irritating subject. It's Sunday morning; I slept well last night and feel okay so far this morning. I've got plans to walk to a friend's house and prep for our conference presentation. And then I'll figure out how to cook corned beef. I rarely bother with Saint Patrick's Day, but Paul loves a holiday dinner and I can't resist a coaxing son.

Interview about "To the Republic"

A few week's ago Vox Populi published my poem "To the Republic," a poem I wrote in (sort of) response to Horace's ode of the same name. My friend David Dear was puzzled by my poem, also puzzled by how the two poems were interconnected, so I invited him to write up a few questions and said I would try to answer them. Yesterday I sat down with those questions, which (not surprisingly, if you know David) were cogent and curious and demanded considerable thought from me. So today, with his permission, I'm sharing this Q&A about the poems.

1. Given that the Horace seems a relatively straightforward allegory, while yours is much more allusive, why did you choose Horace’s as the reference point for yours?

My poem was born during a session of my Thursday-night writing group. Each week, between four and ten women meet for a meal and then write two or three new drafts triggered by prompts that one or the other of us brings along. This draft arose from a very simple prompt that I brought to the group. Merely, we read Horace’s poem, reacted to it briefly, and then I said, “Write a poem titled ‘To the Republic.’” Each of us then wrote for ten minutes and afterward shared our drafts. We never do any workshopping of these drafts; merely we react to what we’re hearing and then move on. But what struck me about this raw work was how different our drafts all were from Horace’s. Each was a metaphor-in-embryo, and all reflected very individual, very private engagements with the notion of republic. No one wrote a “ship of state” kind of piece as he did. One could speculate on the reasons for that: a modern tendency to center work around the personal rather than the polemical; a male-female divide. But what I think, too, is that this very simple prompt tapped into a particular feature of metaphorical search that I have since identified in many resistance poems: the use of metaphor as both cloak (that is, protection from attack) and dagger (a weapon for attack). In addition, the prompt allowed me to see that preplanning a metaphor (Horace’s, for instance, feels very preplanned; Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” is another) is different work from allowing a metaphor to take form organically . . . that is, letting a new poem discover, via the process of writing, the metaphor it will become. 

 2. Horace’s and yours are very different in form; yours in fact could be considered a sonnet. Was that a conscious choice and, if so, why that form?

I did not make any attempt to imitate Horace’s form, nor was I consciously framing my poem as a sonnet. Nonetheless, my thoughts are filled with sonnets, and I fairly often end up with fourteen-liners without trying to. The stanzas here are not traditional octaves and sestets but two sets of five followed by one set of four. So even though they add up to fourteen lines, I found myself playing with them as three five-line stanzas with the final line missing. So, no volta . . . rather, the absence of volta; something unresolved; something darkening.

 3. The light in your poem grows darker as the poem moves along, which seems clearly a metaphor, yet your description of nightfall evokes such quiet and peace. Why the apparent contrast?

The word republic evokes country. On that level of connotation, I love my country, and I fear for my country; ergo, the darkening. The word country itself has double meaning: the nation and the countryside. As a citizen, I am elegiac for my nation; and as a private person, I am elegiac for my forty acres of forest, now lost to me forever. So as I began to tease out new drafts of the poem, these metaphors entangled. Evening is a glorious moment in the Maine woods: the shifts of light, the day sounds becoming the night sounds, the animals alive in air and brush, the poignant singing thrush. But the woods at night are also full of danger. The predators emerge. And the small beings they hunt are not liable to see morning.

 4. Your poem features two animals of the night, an owl and a bat, and you’ve said the poem’s owl’s echoes of Minerva aren’t intentional. Why then did you choose those two, and what do you see them accomplishing in the poem?

I chose those two animals because they are exact for the situation. In the forest, on a summer night, at twilight, the owl and the bat take to the sky. They mark the transition between day and night. And of course they are both beautiful and deadly.

 5. In your last verse, what do you see the night not failing at?

I see the night as not failing to arrive. Twilight in summer is long and lingering, but night is still inevitable.

 6. Do you see the poem as optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

I don’t know that it’s either. I tried to write a poem that simply is. 

 7. It’s been said that a poem is never really finished, a poet eventually just walks away from it. Now that this one has been published, if you had the chance to go back to it, is there anything in it you’d change, and if so, what and why?

I wonder if the repetition of heavens (twice) and heavy so close to them is sonic overkill. I may tinker with that. 

Yesterday was pleasant and slow . . . mostly hanging around the house, but with an outing to the grocery store and then to a Japanese restaurant for a ramen-and-broth lunch. It's so nice to have a son around the house, to be aware of him as a presence, just another householder bumping around doing his own stuff, nobody entertaining anyone else but constantly overlapping in a casual friendly way. Another good thing is that a couple of his closest college friends have moved to Portland since graduation, so now he has a social life beyond his parents when he comes back to Maine. That loneliness was hard to witness when we first moved, especially as it intensified over the pandemic. It lifts my heart to watch him stride outside to greet a waiting friend.

Today he starts his wilderness first responder class, so I'll be back to my usual solitude. I've got a few things to do, emails and class prep and such, and I also want to work on answering a series of questions a friend wrote up about one of my newer poems. I missed my weekly Thursday-night writing group last night, so I'd like to give myself a prompt or two as solace. And next Friday's conference presentation is looming; I should probably run my eyes over those plans.

I'm still not 100 percent healthy, but every day is better. Whatever this illness is, it's clingy, though not debilitating. I want to go for a walk, I want to scratch around in garden soil, but the weather has been cold and windy and not so alluring for a semi-convalescent. I have been getting outside, but I haven't been luxuriating. I'm eager for the soft air.

I had a great day in the classroom with my son. The kids were attentive, chattery, busy, focused, and laughing . . . the session was a complete success. It's a joy to teach with P, a joy to watch his eagerness with the students, to see him think his way through those little intuitive adjustments that are part of every classroom improv.

What a relief not to be flat on my back, too, though I wouldn't say that I am 100 percent well yet . . . still a bit of fatigue and achiness, not quite full enthusiasm about my meals, but I am almost a replica of normal. 

Nonetheless, it is nice to have an unscheduled, unbusy, convalescent day ahead of me . . . idling with a book, going for a walk, running a few errands, playing a board game, taking a nap, doing a few unpressured household chores. I do not know what this illness is (negative Covid test, if you need reassurance), but it's clingy in a low-level way and I would like to erase it thoroughly.

I still felt kind of crappy yesterday morning, but we did drive north in the afternoon, and by the time we arrived my little virus had dissipated and I was feeling mostly back to normal. Thank goodness. I was having visions of sending P alone into the classroom while I lay in bed shivering . . . not what I was hoping for from this class or our visit.

We're staying in a cabin down by the lake, still ice-covered but glossed in water. Every once in a while a snowmobile tears across it at full speed, a spume of spray rising behind. I keep expecting the lake to split open and swallow them up, but the guy at the restaurant says the ice is still two feet thick beneath the skim of melt. Then he says he wouldn't ride across it. I nod, and let ambiguity have the win.

Well, my kid's here, hurray!, but I am unfortunately feeling slightly under the weather . . . not so much so that I can't drive north and do my job but enough to make life less than fun than it was. I did get a solid night's sleep, and here's hoping I continue to feel better this morning. I'll keep you posted.

On the first 40-degree Sunday afternoon of the season, we went to Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth and trudged under this landscape-painter sky, over this curve of wet sand, alongside these slow wrinkles of seawater. Afterward we stopped at a tap house and ate poutine and drank beer and played cards, and then we spent the rest of the evening reading on the couch in front of the fire. And that is why I did no housework, and why I'll be doing it all today.

Our son arrives tonight, so I'll be preparing for that too: turning my study into a bedroom for the week, figuring out a general idea for meals, pulling myself together for our travels up to Monson tomorrow. It will be sweet to have him for such a long stretch--the longest since the pandemic, when he lived with us for a year and a half.

And maybe I'll get to that rose pruning too. Or maybe I'll steal a nap instead. This time change is not easy on people who have to get up at 5 a.m. every weekday.

I've almost finished rereading Far from the Madding Crowd, and I don't have anything lined up to start next--always an uneasy feeling. But something will shout at me from the shelves.

I woke this morning at the regular time but the clocks say I stayed in bed till after 6 so, okay, let's call it sleeping late, but whatever the time the sky is wondrous, a chill pale blue flecked with gulls soaring up from the cove, and the winds have died down, so now the quiet air smells of cold soil and cold salt, half-melted ice piles glisten under new sunlight, and inside the house the furnace grumbles, the cat crunches chow, a thread of steam rises from my coffee cup . . . it is Sunday morning, it is March in Maine, the little house crouches among its dim little gardens, where at the edge of the snow a hellebore, the lenten rose, dormant all winter, is beginning to uncurl its thick stems and lift its heavy buds toward the sun.

If I say I'm tired, I only mean I'm human. My mind ticks off its little tasks for the day . . . buying groceries, cleaning bathrooms, watering houseplants, hanging laundry. If I say I'm sad, I only mean that the earth is so small and space is so vast.

Here it is the weekend, and here I am not sleeping late, which is always a little disappointing, though on the other hand I do like being awake and alone and curled into my couch corner as house and neighborhood slowly shift into daylight. I have some hopes of pruning rosebushes this weekend, which Tom thinks is a silly idea ("There's still snow!") and I think is a charming idea ("There's less snow!"). Roses should be pruned very early in the spring, and since there's nothing else I can do in the garden yet, I always think of that project as an inauguration. But it's true that the air might not be quite warm enough for me to really enjoy myself. I guess I'll have to wait and hope.

Meanwhile, I'm catching glimpses of last fall's spinach crop, green and eager against the muddy soil. And as soon as the snow melts a bit more, I'll be able to get into the kale bed, cut away the winter-wilted stalks, and make way for new shoots. The suddenness of spring is always an amazement: by the end of the month I should be harvesting.

I started off yesterday feeling a little glum about myself, but then at lunchtime I had a surprise visit from north-country friends, and afterward I spent all afternoon talking to Teresa and Jeannie about poems. So I'm more or less back on track now, still a little wobbly, but who isn't? I'm reading Thomas Hardy, I'm slicing up vegetables, I'm stoking the wood stove, I'm shamelessly enjoying these comma splices, I'm feeling the planet shift and roll beneath my feet.

Spring is, without question, my favorite season. Every year I am gobsmacked, exhilarated . . . I long for it. Spring is to the body what imagination is to the mind: a reckless wonder.

Yesterday's puddles have have tightened into ice. Walkways are glossy under the streetlights, and coaxing the recycling bin to the curb will be an adventure.

This afternoon Jeannie and Teresa and I will have our monthly Poetry Lab conversation, and I've been working on a set of poems to get ready, reading the books we've decided to discuss, jotting down various small thoughts to share. So I hope the sun comes out this morning and thaws the ice so I can get outside for a walk beforehand. My body is tired of winter.

I've plucked Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd off the shelf but haven't yet opened it. The poems of Garcia Lorca are rattling around in my skull. I want to be a real artist but I'm not sure I'll ever get there. I'm feeling cramped in myself. I'm not enough.

This is where the chores come in handy. Chop wood, haul water, as they say . . . that bossy, self-confident they, the booming pronouncements of the Eternal Dad. 

It's Friday, it's second-guess-myself day, it's what-the-hell-do-I-think-I'm-up-to day, and that always irritates the Eternal Dad. Find something to do or I'll find it for you, he warns. And eventually: Do you want me to give you something to cry about?

Rain poured all night, and is still pouring, and the temperature is 46 degrees, and I am eager, eager for daylight so I can see what's happening out there in the melting, waking-up world. Is the garlic sprouting? Are the maples budding? Will robins be hustling across the bare brown grass?

Today is Thursday, my writing-group night, and I have been writing all week, though mostly not poems, mostly introductions, discussion starters, and prompts for my poetry-as-resistance class, a task that always takes a long time, with the syllabus becoming a sort of personal essay for the release of my own thoughts. I don't lecture in class, but I do lecture myself into understanding how a class might unfold, and that all ends up on paper. I doubt this is an efficient approach to class planning, but it is the only way I know how to do it.

In the meantime I finished Villette and have taken a small breather with a thin Barbara Pym novel before I start the next big one--most likely Thomas Hardy. Still, I opened the Pym yesterday evening and this is what I found:

The small things of life were so often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, . . . the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

I was jolted. It is always unnerving when a book suddenly turns on me and says, "Hey, I've been watching you."

Sometimes, when I'm feeling maudlin, I wonder if there can be anyone on earth who loves reading more than I do. Of course, there are better readers, and smarter readers, more prescient readers, more analytical readers, readers with more stamina, braver and more adventurous readers, more precise readers. But do any of those readers adore their friends as much as I do?

I think of Charlotte Bronte. Yesterday I was almost complaining about her, but truth be told: while Emily is the more fashionable Bronte, Charlotte is all mine. On the simplest level, like Louisa May Alcott, she created characters who gave her readers hope. Jo in Little Women is encouragement for all bookish girls . . . yes, life is for you! And Bronte's heroines are encouragement for all plain and thorny girls . . . yes, you too can engage in aggressive, erotic warfare with the most interesting man in the room, and he will like it. But of course Bronte's writings are far more than romantic fantasy. They are delineations of self-repression. If Alcott's Jo yearns to leap into life with her arms open, Bronte's Lucy Snowe knows from the beginning that she must always stay wound in barbed wire. Though no matter how tightly she armors herself, there are chinks.

These tiny harsh women, wending their way across strange and unforgiving landscapes: they are nothing like me, either physically or spiritually, but I suffer with them again and again on each rereading.

Yesterday, as I scurried from car to fish market, car to Italian market, the breeze tearing up from the bay was like iron. But already it's much warmer outside than it was yesterday. The winds have shifted, the earth has turned; suddenly the scent of the air has changed, and the cat is bouncing up and down and batting at the door knob, begging to be let out.

For the past few days I've been rereading Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which is not a cheerful book. All of her novels are repressed chaos scattered with firefights and implosions, and this one in particular reeks of tamped-down arson. Probably it wasn't the best choice for the moment, but too late now: I'm stuck inside. Perhaps a walk in modest sunshine will be a moderating influence. Perhaps I could write a little arson myself, as an antidote.

I got my basic housework done yesterday, so my obligations are thin. Maybe today I'll spring-clean a room. Maybe today I'll work on writing prompts for my poetry-as-resistance class. Maybe I'll take the violin out of its case. Maybe someone will knock on the door and sweep me out of my rut. With all of the windows shut tight, the Bronte miasma is a bit overpowering.

The thermometer reads eight degrees this morning, but the weather forecast promises that today will be the last of the deep cold for a while. Ahead we've got days in the forties, maybe even reaching the fifties by next week, and I am eager for the muddy, melting mess that equals early spring in northern New England.

No travel this week, and a fairly loose schedule. I'm waiting for a new editing project, and P and I already have our planning done for next week's Monson scriptwriting class, so mostly I'll be working on teaching conference prep, the upcoming Poetry Kitchen class, and my own poems, along with whatever spring-cleaning projects I set for myself.

Yesterday I got a note from the publisher of Vox Populi telling me that my poem "To the Republic," released yesterday, "is the best poem about our national crisis that’s been written so far. It is a masterpiece of evocation and restraint." This is straight-up flattery and cannot possibly be true. Nonetheless, his kindness has led me to think about metaphor as both cloak and dagger. I think maybe I'll talk about that during my writing-for-the-resistance classes this spring.

Yesterday I caught sight of the first hyacinth spikes poking up in the warmth of our house foundation. The neighbor's snowdrops were eagerly blossoming; the cemetery walkways were a delta of puddles and lakes. But this morning we're back to cold, and the snowpiles are shiny with frozen snowmelt, and gritty and gray with time. March in Maine is not a beautiful month, at the ground level.

I've been dealing with a sciatica flareup and I gave into it yesterday--not doing nothing (I walked and stretched and kept up with my usual activities) but conscientiously managing it, carefully working around it, which is its own version of a chore. I hope all of my fuss will pay off with a better day today, but we'll see. Nerve pain follows its own mysterious schedule. I can go for months without a twinge, and then bam: the knife.

Yesterday I listened to a little spring training baseball. I marinated chicken in buttermilk, then oven-fried it alongside roasting Brussels sprouts. I read Charlotte Bronte's Villette, and went for a walk with Tom, and helped my kid edit his professional bio, and wrote emails to some writer friends, and fiddled around with poem drafts, and played cards, and took an afternoon nap. In other words, I didn't do much, and let's hope my right hip is grateful.

Vox Populi published one of my new poems today. It's titled "To the Republic." I'm sure the editor's timing was no mistake.

It is humiliating to be an American.

Over the phone my son asks, "What can I do? I have no power."

Every day the screeds of furious women thrash through my inbox. They want to organize marches, they want to read serious books, they want to write letters to the government. They are drenched in dread and impotence.

Over the phone I ask my son, "What good will this do? Whose mind will this change?"

Every day the internet throbs and twitches: boycott! general strike! 

Over the phone my son says, "Do they not understand that poor people have no choice about where and when to shop?" Over the phone I say, "Tom already works too many hours. We cannot afford to lose wages during a general strike."

Every day I think about how far away my sons live. What if the planes can no longer fly safely? What if the trains are defunded? What if there's a civil war? What if the Russians take over? What if my boys are conscripted? What if I never see them again?

Over the phone my son says, "I have painted my dining room four different bright colors."

Over the phone I say, "The cardinals are singing their spring songs."

It is terrifying to be an American.

It rained and wet-snowed most of yesterday, but today is forecast to be sunny, and I'm looking forward to an afternoon walk, once the ice clears. Surely I'll see more snowdrops today. Already in my own yard the shapes of the garden boxes are starting to reappear, and with a little more melting I'll glimpse the first garlic spears poking up among the leaves.

I went out to write last night, which gave me a couple of new drafts to play with. That's good because my day is pretty loose, work-wise. I finished up an editing project yesterday and haven't received a new one yet, so now is a fine time to mess around with a few poems. But I'll also keep chipping away at my conference planning, and I've still got that spring generative-writing workshop to organize. It's not like I ever have nothing to do.

I know I told you that the April 19 Poetry Kitchen workshop is full. The May 3 session is also filling, but there are still a few spaces left, if you've got any interest in writing with me that day. Likewise, the Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts is now two-thirds full, but space still waits for you. And if you have any ability to sponsor scholarships to the Monson Arts conference, I would be so incredibly grateful. We have several applicants this year, all without access to institutional funding, and I would love to make sure that they can all attend.

I've been considering running an online-only, abbreviated taste of the conference, probably later in the summer, probably just a day or two long. If that's something you'd be interested in, let me know.

This week is whipping past, I suppose because I've been on the road for a third of it and disrupted from my home schedule. It's hard to believe it's Thursday already--not that I'm complaining, because Thursday is writing-with-my-poets night and that is always good. But I do feel slightly breathless about time.

I did see a snowdrop yesterday, just a single bud, hoisting itself from the slush. And today we'll have rain, so I expect to be spotting more very soon. My own gardens are still buried in snow, but after the next few days of rain they, too, may start showing their colors.

Everywhere on my walk yesterday the neighborhood cardinals were singing, woodpeckers were hammering, crows were sailing, bluejays were plundering. The birds are busy, busy, and the squirrels are rushing across the snowy yards, skittering up the fat trunks of the maples, their mouths stuffed with leaves--repairing their nests, getting ready for babies.

And the sky is a wild rush--sun and breeze and cloud. Sand skitters in the gutters, and dogs tug at their leashes, and teenagers insist on wearing miniskirts to school, and poets pull off their knitted hats and let their heads be cold because the air is too exhilarating to resist.

Home again, in warmish, dripping Portland, Maine. We still have a thick snowpack, but all night chunks of snow and ice slid noisily off the roof as snowmelt pecked at the windows and vents. Today is forecast to be sunny and 45 degrees, and after a month of ice and cold I am itching to get outside, especially after hours spent in the classroom and the car. Maybe I'll see the first blooming snowdrops! I am excited to find out.

Yesterday was the final session in my big three-class revision event, and in two weeks my son will be with me to lead a fun day on scriptwriting. He'll be staying with us for a week, first teaching with me, then attending a several-day wilderness first responder class that he needs for his summer canoe job. It will be such a treat to have him around for so long--something to look forward to in March, a notably aggravating month in the north country.

Today I'll be back to editing in the morning, running errands in the afternoon, catching up on laundry and reading . . . the usual minutiae of my life. I've got a stack of poem drafts that I've been working on steadily for the past week, and I'm pleased with how they're opening up, how they're surprising me. It's been instructive to move from one to the other, noting how each requires a different reading, a different ear, a different experiment.

My thoughts about Nicholas Nickleby still linger. I've been playing with his "precision of exaggeration" in these drafts . . . and it is feeling like an important revision layer, one that intimately affects dramatic movement. None of these poems is long; a couple are extremely small; but that makes the need for dramatic control even more delicate and specific.

This work I do never stops thrilling me.

I expected to spend the evening alone in my apartment, but instead I ended up sitting around with the Monson Arts chef and her husband and one of the resident artists, drinking red wine, eating lamb and greens, and having an unexpectedly social night. It was a lovely surprise, as was the long intense sleep I fell into afterward.

And so here I am, the next morning, lolling and yawning, in no hurry at all to get up and get going. Yes, I've got a full day of teaching ahead and a long drive home, but there is a holiday pleasure in not leaping out of bed at 5 a.m. and hurtling directly into chores.

The battery on my laptop is running down, so I will end this note and coax myself out of bed and into the shower and onto my workday. And when I step outside a faint scent of spring will rise from the grimy snowpack.

The weekend was quiet, undemanding, and friendly, with plenty of sleep, good opener to a packed week. I head north this afternoon, teach tomorrow, and then on Wednesday I'll be back in the editing saddle, a backup singer belting other people's tunes. [Ah, mixed metaphors: how you amuse me.]

I finished Nicholas Nickleby yesterday--800 pages devoured in less than a week. I will say I felt a little sad that no one responded to my excitement about his precision of exaggeration. It felt important to me, a discovery, a specific recognition of a specific tool for intensifying a writer's and reader's engagement. But of course my thrills aren't yours, and few people adore Dickens today, let alone view him as a craft model. I shouldn't take it to heart.

I am sixty years old and I am still rereading books that I first read at the age of twelve or thirteen. Most prominent of these are the novels of Dickens. No writer has affected me more. The other day, after sitting in on my online class, Teresa pointed out the gothic echoes in one of my poems. She wondered about a Poe influence. "Dickens," I said, "of course Dickens." He infects my sentence rhythms, my grammar, my word choice, my taste for melodrama, my tragicomic characters, my sentimental home scenes, my social commentary. He is everywhere in my creative life, peering over my shoulder as I peer over his.

Part of what makes him indispensable (to me, I mean; most other people find him dispensable enough) is how exact he is in his exaggerations . . . which sounds like an oxymoron, but read this passage from Nicholas Nickleby to see what I mean:

It is observable that when people upon the stage are in any strait involving the very last extremity of weakness and exhaustion, they invariably perform feats of strength requiring great ingenuity and muscular power. Thus, a wounded prince or bandit-chief, who is bleeding to death and too faint to move, except to the softest music (and then only upon his hands and knees), shall be seen to approach a cottage door for aid, in such a series of writhings and twisting, and with such curlings up of the legs, and such rollings over and over, and such gettings up and tumblings down again, as could never be achieved save by a very strong man skilled in posture-making. And so natural did this sort of performance come to Mr. Snittle Timberry that on their way out of the theatre and towards the tavern where the supper was to be holden, he testified [to] the severity of his recent indisposition and its wasting effects upon the nervous system, by a series of gymnastic performances which were the admiration of all witnesses.

Look at his precision in describing theatrical overacting; look at how overboard he goes in that precision; look at how he then transfers that description seamlessly into the absurd public behavior of an extremely minor character who appears only briefly late in the novel . . . which is to say, Dickens puts this level of descriptive intensity into even the throwaway elements of his narrative. This is the kind of stuff that killed me when I was a kid, and it still kills me. 

I could talk forever about Dickens but one other thing I've been noticing on this rereading of Nicholas Nickleby is his commentary on working-class women: specifically, the contrast between actresses and seamstresses. The women actors are lively, self-confident, talkative, and full of power. They hold equal status with the men actors; they make decisions for themselves, both in life and on the stage. Yes, they are silly and grubby and down-at-heel, but they are essentially happy. In comparison, the seamstresses are wan and pale and meek. They are at the mercy of unscrupulous men. They are derided by fashionable women. Yes, these are Victorian tropes for suffering virtue. But the seamstresses have no fun. And the actresses have so much fun.

Certainly Dickens, in his personal life, was deeply confused by the cult of pure womanhood that he himself promoted in his genteel characters. But when he was able to slip out of those blinders and look at real working women, he saw things clearly enough.

Maybe I love Dickens in part because I sympathize with his murky longings (often unreal and ridiculous, and don't we all have them?) and am wholly in love with the incisive clarity of his exaggerations. So what if his novels are sentimental? So what if his social answers are too easy? No one else has ever created such worlds-on-paper . . . crowded and dirty and brawling and beautiful.

It's Saturday morning, and I wallowed in bed till 6. I don't have to teach either day this weekend or travel anywhere, and though I have things to do, I can do them whenever I feel like it.

What I feel like doing right now is sitting here in my couch corner, wrapped in my shabby red bathrobe, peacefully drinking strong black coffee, and staring out into the lavender sky. It's cold out there, just 7 degrees, but the middays are thawing a bit. There was even a little melting in progress yesterday, when Betsy and I were out on our walk. Maple sap starts to run in this kind of weather, on these bright days and frigid nights, and my sap starts to run too. In the firmament the red-tailed hawks are courting, and down on the prosaic ground I lift my muzzle like a dog, snuffing up the first faint whiffs of change.

During our walk Betsy and I talk about poem revision, our own and other people's: what is the resistance? what is the sudden dazzle? She is planning a talk about Cavafy, and I am immersed in Lyrical Ballads, and we are clumping along the cemetery paths, two mild-mannered aging ladies out for an afternoon constitutional, our brains stuffed with roses and briars. I have a teenage urge to giggle. Poetry as disguise, as secret handshake. Bet you don't know what we're thinking.

Yesterday was all poetry, all the time. I began my morning with a notebook and three collections: Betsy Sholl's As If a Song Could Save You, Diane Seuss's Modern Poetry, and Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. I'm reading Seuss for conversations with Teresa and Jeannie, C&W for conversations with Teresa, and Sholl for conversations with the poet; and mid-morning the poet herself dropped by, so we drank coffee and started to figure out how we might approach our upcoming public conversation about each other's work . . . and also ended up talking about Seuss and C&W and many other things. These poetry days are my daydream days, miracles come true, those childhood imaginings of what it might feel like to live in a world where people actually write and read and talk about books with deep purpose, humility, and delight.

And then in the evening I went out to write with my poetry group, and now this morning a messy but lively draft bubbles in my notebook, a project to look forward to after I get home from the vet.

I know the sentences in this letter are baggy, but that seems to be the sound in my head this morning. Maybe my mind is too full of surprises; maybe my language will lighten as the sun comes up.

Forgive me. Sometimes poems make me inarticulate.

Well, it happened to me yesterday: I was offered a well-paying gig that would have had me working directly for a Republican institution. The person who contacted me was friendly and well mannered. I turned down the job in an equally well mannered way. There were no fireworks. But I can't quite rub off the dread. This is the sort of job that pays far more per hour than I am accustomed to receiving. The institution is well known and has an academic gloss. I've had interactions with one of its staff members in the past, a scholar who has been published by a press I edit for. A couple of years ago I did a smallish proofreading job for the institution, just checking preexisting speech text for errors. There was nothing wicked involved, no compromising of morals. But this time? No. No. No.

I understand our entangled money trails. My husband builds houses for wealthy people, many of whom are undoubtedly conservatives. I work for an arts organization that's been funded by early-stage Silicon Valley wealth. There is no purity in how we earn our livings.

But we earn our livings precariously. That, I think, is the source of the dread I feel about having turned down the Republican gig. I recoil from the thought of taking a direct paycheck for editing a book that would promote that ideology. I will not do it. But what is the future of the jobs I will do? What will my options be?

For now, I splash forward into my everyday tasks: writing and teaching, talking and listening, scrubbing and folding. Last night I invented a soup based around yellow-eye beans, slow-cooked chicken, a rich vegetable broth, and a salsa of chopped cherry tomatoes, scallions, and home-dried basil. It was chunky and velvety and deep-flavored, and we ate it with fresh cheddar biscuits and a salad of mandarin oranges and spinach. It was one of those moments when everything fits: a cold night, steam rising, food satisfying and beautiful, candles glinting on blue bowls, pleasure in the other's company.

Every day is a seesaw. Every damn day.

The deep cold continues. Outside it's three degrees above zero; inside I'm recovering from a horrible nightmare about a Comanche attack, one of the scariest dreams I've had for a long time. I'm drinking my coffee, gazing at a bouquet of pale tulips, gradually recovering my composure. But jeez.

Yesterday morning I sorted out my tax paperwork. This morning I'm having tea with a friend so that we can sketch out ideas for the presentation we're giving at the Maine Council for English Language Arts conference in March. Tomorrow morning I'm having coffee with another friend so that we can sketch out ideas for the presentation we're giving at the Plunkett Poetry Festival in April. On Friday morning I'm bringing the cat to the vet for his rabies shot. In between times I'm working on teaching conference plans and high school class plans. That's the kind of week this is, all prep and no pay, but at least the weather isn't luring me into procrastination.

I've started rereading Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, a sweet plunge down one of my old, old rabbit holes. I know my nightmares and sleeplessness are rising from fears about the state of the nation, so I've been trying to weigh how I'm using my daylight hours. How am I committing to the resistance via what used to be called "humane letters"? How am I caring for home and beloveds? How am ensuring my own resilience over the long haul? Some of that self-care is linked to my need for the familiar stories of my youth. Dickens has always had a powerful influence on my sentences, my ventures into narrative and character and drama, my thoughts about writers as activists. But he is also sheer comfort.

It's frigid out there--ten degrees above zero, with a wind chill of ten below, the wind whipping and tearing and groaning, the stiff and snowy yards carved into dioramas of Antarctica, all peaks and ice. Yesterday my neighbor and I walked out to lunch, an adventure that felt like polar exploration. And yet, when I staggered home, a red-faced Yeti, my living room was bathed in sunshine, the light almost springlike. It's all very confusing to the senses.

Yesterday was catch-up-on-housework day. Today will be get-my-tax-stuff-in-order day. I can't say I'm looking forward to the job, but it is good to have a bit of time and space to get it done . . . and to have a desk to spread it out on instead of an elderly ironing board disguised as a shelf. Afterward I'll let myself turn to poem drafts, or teaching plans, or prepping for some of the spring events that are hurtling forward on the calendar. Betsy Sholl and I have been asked to lead a public conversation about each other's work at the Plunkett Poetry Festival in April, and neither of us has yet begun to think about how we're going to do that. So probably I ought to take a stab at it.

My lunch outing made it clear that any walking in this town is an expedition, which is too bad because I'd like to get outside into the sunlight. But I think I am reduced to exercising on my mat for the foreseeable future. Between the bitter cold and the terrible footing, there's not much to be said for the outdoor life at the moment.

But the little house is pleasant, even if the cat is cranky.

So here I am, writing to you at 4:30 in the morning, because I have been awake since more or less 2:30 and I finally gave up and came downstairs to make coffee and sit quietly for a moment before T's alarm goes off and we have to lurch and stumble into snow shoveling. Late yesterday afternoon we cleaned out the driveway and the sidewalks, but overnight several more sleety icy inches fell and the city plows proceeded to transform each driveway into a walled city. It's an ugly sight and I am not enthusiastic.

Still, I have a moment here to myself.

It was a long weekend--good but long. Teaching at that intensity is tiring, zoom adds to the weariness, but afterward I received this note from one of the participants, which brought me to tears:

I always enjoy your workshops because you delve deeply into work and also because your prompts always challenge what is on the page to revise its way of being. You have a magical way of showing a break dancer ballet moves. The poems come out like someone has brushed the lint off a jacket. This is to say, for anyone at any level, you honor their own creative muscle and let them flex it.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm making a mistake, if participants would really prefer that I get off my cloud and go ahead and slash up their drafts with a red pen. But I just can't bear to do it. I hate that version of power so much. My abhorrence for correcting papers is a major reason I evaded full-time teaching. And to do it to poetry, poetry . . . the act feels like pure poison.

So I've invented these work-arounds, ways to talk about revision without telling people what to change, and I know they often come as a shock. People enter a revision class focused on Wrong. I ask them to focus on Look what you are making.

Anyway, now it's Monday. A big job is behind me; big jobs are ahead of me, including that wretched snow shoveling and all of the laundry and housework I did not do over the weekend. But my neighbor and I are going to go out for lunch, and I won't be required to use my brain too much today, and maybe tonight I'll get a real night's sleep. 

Now, at first light, the windows shimmer pale on pale. It snowed all night and it will snow all day, and the sky is the color of north.

I cannot see the cove from my house, but the cove is close by, it lives down the street and around the corner, the cove is as round as a silver coin, and I see it in my thoughts under the whispering snow.

The quiet of snow is like the quiet of fresh bread cooling on a rack. It breathes to itself, it creaks and crackles, softly, softly.

If I were standing outside I would lift my face into the flakes and I would be lonely because snow always turns me lonely. Even when the hill is filled with sledders, even when the pond is filled with skaters, I am by myself when the snow is salting my face.

This is why I wanted to be an Arctic explorer when I was a little girl. I would be lonely but I would have a dog.

Being a poet is the closest I came. It is the loneliest job I have ever done.

This is why I am talking about snow.

The little northern city by the sea is encased in ice, and the ice doesn't show any interest in melting, though everyone's been trying. I had to go to three stores yesterday before I found one that still had bags of rock salt on the shelf. The clerk at Walgreen's told me that a desperate customer had settled for a canister of iodized salt. Desperate is no surprise: the roads are passable but the sidewalks and driveways are a misery, and we've got another round of mess coming tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it's cold . . . seven degrees and windy. You know I love weather, but this morning I am glad not be to be outside skate-wrestling with firewood and barn chores, as I would have been doing in the old days. I've lost my affinity for ice storms, if I ever had one.

Anyway the weekend will already be intense, without adding skate-wrestling to the mix. I'll be teaching both days--a revision session, with a fully subscribed class--and I'll be trying out some new approaches that I may fold into the Monson conference this summer, if they work out well in this context. So I feel like I'm not only preparing to teach in the present but also preparing to observe myself teaching in the future, which is just as convoluted as this sentence is.

However, for the moment: hot coffee, lamplight, a quiet room, my red bathrobe, warmth seeping through the registers. My current favorite song is flickering through my head--Beyonce's gorgeous "II Most Wanted," which I replayed maybe fifty times yesterday. If you haven't heard it, the song is a duet collaboration with Miley Cyrus, overflowing with rich complicated harmonies and a soaring chorus: love song, elegy, road tune, and beauty, and two women singing their hearts out to each other. I have a giant crush on it.

The neighborhood is frozen up, every surface iced over and slick as grease. Somehow I've got to manage to get the recycling bin to the curb, a routine task that may be an epic one today. Let's hope the roads are better than the walkways, stairs, and driveways because T has to go to work no matter what.

This morning I've got a Zoom meeting about those writing samples I've been judging, and then I'm off the clock for the rest of the day. I have some poem drafts percolating, and planning to do for the teaching conference, and I ought to get onto my mat, and later out to the grocery store once the ice softens up, but the shape of the day will be my own. I'll be teaching both days this weekend, so I'm happy to have a little space.

Yesterday I received an updated registration list for July's Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts. We're doing really, really well--the conference is three-quarters full already, and it's only February. I'm pleased, and I'm excited, because this session will be breaking into new territory as far as my teaching work goes: lots of focus on collaboration and interdisciplinary work, lots of focus on how poetry extends beyond itself into other endeavors.

But I have to say I'm also happy to have a few hours to myself this week, to look inward, to burrow into my own private worlds. 

Because the April 19 session of "Poems of Defiance, Poems of Love" filled so rapidly, I took the (for me) unprecedented step of scheduling a second session of the same class. It will take place on Saturday, May 3, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. ET on Zoom, and will cost $75 dollars. Amazingly it, too, is beginning to fill. So if you are toying with the idea, do sign up ASAP because I'm pretty sure I won't be offering a third one.

Clearly something about the class description has touched a nerve. We're wrestling with helplessness, even as we're clear-eyed about what's happening to our nation. It will be good to be together, talking and mourning and working.

**

I thought I'd be waking up to another snowstorm, but so far there's only a dusting out there. Still, schools everywhere are closed in anticipation, which means the roads should be quiet, which means T shouldn't have much trouble getting to work. But this will be the second Thursday storm in a row; I've already missed my writing group twice (once when recovering from my snow odyssey up north), and I fear tonight will be the third time. I guess we'll see.

Valentine's Day is on Friday, and T will most likely forget it. That used to hurt my feelings, but now I just think it's funny. Plus, his forgetfulness gives me the opportunity to celebrate in whatever way occurs to me. Yesterday, for instance, I discovered that mussels were on sale at the fish market, so I made us an early Valentine's dinner: a big batch of mussels steamed in wine, lemon, garlic, and butter; sourdough toast; a warm Greek salad; lemon-poppyseed poundcake. I still can't get over how sweet it is to cook in this dear little kitchen, everything so tidy and bright and convenient. T will forget Valentine's Day, but the kitchen he made is a valentine itself. Every time I use it I feel loved.

It's a silly holiday. But so what? 

My trip up north went far more smoothly than the last one did: no bad weather (though my car thermometer did read eleven below in Harmony) and a full class of peppy and focused kids. Still, I'm glad to be home again, glad to have a day to pull myself together--laundry-wise, grocery-wise, desk-wise. With two more storms looming this week I need to cram the errands into today, and try to get my walk in as well, while the sidewalks are still semi-passable. I'll be teaching all weekend, so the home stuff feels especially pressing. But at least I won't have to drive to work while we're getting twenty inches of snow.

Teresa and I are starting to focus seriously on our summer teaching conference plans, and I've now acquired a stack of books that I'll start combing through for primary-source excerpts. It feels like I'm always immersed in teaching these days, either planning or executing: both take so much time. And on Friday I've got a meeting linked to that judging gig I've been doing . . . A certain breathlessness of mood overcomes me. 

A small poem draft has been sitting open on my laptop, and now and again I dip into it, to steady myself.

I woke in the night to hear Steve stoking the stoves downstairs. There is hardly any sound more comfortable than clank of iron, chunk of logs--the contentment of knowing that someone else is taking care of the warmth. It's four below zero here in the homeland, but I am as snug as a rabbit in this bedroom with a stovepipe running through it, these thick blankets, the cold creaking dark beyond the window.

 Monday again: how does it keep showing up so often? I'll be on the road today, teaching tomorrow, squeezing my travel deftly between the next round of snowstorms. We got eight fluffy inches yesterday, but have another five or six inches due on Thursday and then twelve or so next weekend. Given how high the banks are already, I'm not quite sure where we'll put that much more snow. Melting doesn't seem to be in the forecast.

This morning I'll get onto my mat, get my housework finished, pull myself together teaching-wise, maybe take a look at a poem draft. I'm feeling kind of scattershot--probably a side-effect of bouncing from job to job to job to job. Freelancing is a weird state of mind.

Re scheduling a second session of "Poems of Defiance, Poems of Love": I've had a few people reach out to say they'd be interested in an April 20 class. Please let me know if you would be too so I can figure out if it makes to sense to advertise it. I'd like to aim for at least six participants, capping at twelve. Remember that this will be a generative session--conversations about poems, writing prompts, lots of off-screen time to yourself. You should get four or five new drafts out of the day--all for the low, low price of $75. Every level of experience (including none and lots) is welcome.

It's Sunday, it's dark, it's snowing hard, and I've kindled a fire in the wood stove just for the pleasure of combining flames and snow and idleness. As expected, my reading in Brunswick was canceled, so the day stretches out before me, reading and housework and snow shoveling . . . but first this couch corner and this small cup of coffee and this golden fire licking into life.

As a sad Buffalo Bills fan, I naturally have little interest in the Super Bowl this year. I could offer a tepid Go, Eagles wave, but I hate commercials and I'm sick of the Chiefs and I don't want to catch any ghoulish glimpses of Trump and I can watch Kendrick's halftime show on YouTube tomorrow. Which is to say, no part of today will be spent fixing football snacks. Last night I made braised lemony chicken legs, with a side of roasted spinach and another of black beans, red peppers, and corn. Now I have enough leftover chicken to furnish the base for a chicken and vegetable soup tonight--a very un-Super Bowl-ish meal, best enjoyed in quiet at a dining-room table.

The Poetry Kitchen class I posted yesterday is now entirely full. It is gratifying to see that people want to sign up for these sessions. I try to keep them affordable and personal, but I'm aware that there are hundreds of other options floating around in the aether. It's not a given that anyone would choose me, and I'm still a little startled when they do.

That said, if you are interested in the class and did not get a chance to register before it filled, let me know ASAP. I would be willing to run a second session on Sunday, April 20, if needed. This class is for anyone, poet or poetry-shy, who wants to try their hand at framing their feelings about the state of the nation. If you are struggling, know that many other people are as well. I want these classes to be a gathering place--a place to support one another, and resist, and celebrate new work rising from the ashes.

 I've posted a new Poetry Kitchen class, a one-day generative-writing session I'm calling "Poems of Defiance, Poems of Love: Making New Work in Hard Times." It seemed to me that this kind of community resistance might be what many of us need--a day for focusing on how we, and others before and around us, turn to words at moments of crisis. The class will take place on April 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time, and the link will give you further details and the registration form. You might want to snag a space soon if you're interested, as it's already starting to fill.

I didn't intend to use my day off yesterday to start designing a new class, but I was playing with a poem draft that was going nowhere and I needed to find some way of being productive. Sometimes a planned writing day just doesn't work out. And that's okay. Thank goodness, I am way beyond beating myself up over writing disappointments. I was trying to work in a form that was resisting me, and I did figure out why: because the form was based on a spelling constraint, and my lines required more sonic freedom. I may not have made a poem, but I did make a poetic discovery, which is its own version of success.

Lately my teaching has been centering more and more around the notion of self-awareness. Simply: "Look hard at your work. What is it?" Over the past several years, this has become a center of my own practice--a way to sidestep self-judgment and external expectation and concentrate on "What, precisely, have I made?" If I can really see what's there, I can begin to imagine what could be there.

This shift in focus has made a tremendous difference in my ability to truly experiment with my material. I may be a timid driver, but I do not want to be a timid poet. For the great poems are fictions--which is to say, even those poems that seem to ride on the voice of an intimate speaker in a homely situation do not reenact real life but create an imaginative portal into a frame of time, space, and emotional shimmer. To build and refine such an artifact, the poet has to study and study and study again--without judgment, without preconception--what exists on the page and in the air: now, at this exact moment, in this exact version.

Achieving such clarity is not an exercise in logic. It's an exercise in immersion. It is opening your awareness to the multiplicity of your achievements. It is looking at your draft with love.

I haven't written about cooking for quite a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been in the kitchen. Earlier this week, for various meals, I made kale soup, shrimp etouffee, a salad of roasted Brussel sprouts and mandarin oranges, and a pumpkin buttermilk pudding. Last night I made baked tofu with soba noodles and vegetables: as you can see in the photo, with carrots, wild mushrooms, cabbage, red onion, and scallions. For dessert I put together a peach cobbler, using fruit my friend Angela had processed and frozen over the summer.

Winter cooking is not as divine as cooking from the kitchen garden, but it still has many charms. A freezer full of wild mushrooms is one beautiful constraint. All of that frozen kale is another. Though my autumn tomato sauce is now gone, I've still got lots of my own dried herbs, quarts of homemade stock, fish from the market down on the pier, as well as top-quality lamb from Angela's daughter at Maplemont Farm in Vermont.

As yesterday's snowstorm petered into streetlit flurries, I thawed peaches and julienned carrots and diced cabbage, and I thought about the many years, day in and out, that my hands and thoughts have narrowed down to the late-day task of making a meal for my people. Among all of my routine and endless chores, cooking is the one that I most love . . . though I would hate to work in a restaurant or for pay. I am the epitome of the home cook: small-scale, plain-skilled, trying to do the best I can--taste-, nutrition, and beauty-wise-- with the materials at hand.

Nonetheless, being the household's primary cook is a point of pride and identity. I love to plan meals. I love to grow meals. I love to arrange food on a plate. I love filling the house with the scent of dinner. I love crisply folded cloth napkins, and neatly laid silverware, and ice cubes clinking in the water glasses. We light candles for dinner every night, except in high summer. I love the slight formality of our dinners together. I love giving a meal as a gift, every single night.

I had a bunch of out-of-the-house stuff scheduled for today, yet suddenly they've dwindled to just one. Sally, who cuts my hair, texted to ask about moving my appointment to tomorrow. Zanne, who hosts our writing group, decided to postpone our gathering until next week. Snow is supposed to arrive midday and last into the evening commute, and everyone is getting ready for a mess.

So my jaunts are reduced to an early morning trip to the medical lab for bloodwork, a boring chore that I have been forgetting to do since I had my last doctor's appointment. But I should get there and back well before the storm begins; maybe I'll even fit in a walk before the snow starts accumulating, and then I can settle down in the house and get my work done.

I didn't quite finish the editing project yesterday, so that's job number one. And then I'll get my high school plans set, and then I'll turn my attention to poems. This will be my second week in a row without my Thursday poetry group, and I'm itchy to write. Partly that's because of yesterday's phone call with Teresa. Mostly we talked about Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and that conversation has worked me into a tizzy, in the best possible way. Among other things, I discovered as we were talking how deeply I know that poem--by sound, by image . . . though I have never tried to memorize it, never studied it any deep academic way. Merely I've read and reread it a hundred times, so often that it has lodged itself into the coils of my brain. I have been changed by the Rime, but I didn't realize that until we started talking about what we were seeing and hearing and feeling this time around.

Meanwhile, Teresa, who is devoted to Moby-Dick, was awash in the joyous discovery that Melville, too, must have known the poem well . . . "Look at this, listen to this!" The two of us were like 12-year-olds with a new boy-band poster.

O reading, the great love affair.

And how thrilling it is to be with readers who read like I do. That is one of the great and stunning delights of my collaborations with Teresa and Jeannie Beaumont: all three of us are fiendishly devoted readers and rereaders, wallowers in fat books, old books, unfashionable books; shameless, overexcited, greedy; with nobody but each other to chatter to about our passion.

These off-weeks between my Monson trips fly by. It's Wednesday already, and already I need to think about traveling on Monday, even though I feel like I'm still recovering from last week's snowstorm nightmare.

Suddenly, after a dry early winter, we are being socked with one Yankee clipper after another. A storm's on the way for tomorrow, threatening to derail my haircut and my writing group. Another's on the way on Sunday, when I'm supposed to be motoring up to Brunswick for an afternoon reading. I do love to watch snow fall; I love to see the drifts draped over my garden. Just don't make me drive.

Today I've got some hopes of finishing my current editing project, and this afternoon Teresa and I will talk about Lyrical Ballads and do some Conference on Poetry and Learning planning. Last I heard we were already half full, registration-wise, so talk to me soon if you've got questions about the program, housing, etc. The town would make a lovely lakeside vacation spot for family, and there are nearby off-site options where you can bring dogs and kids. Maine is vacationland, you know. It says so right on our license plates.

I finished rereading Emma, and it made me so happy that I immediately started rereading Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, another deeply satisfying novel. Both also dovetail beautifully with the Lyrical Ballads project, so I can pretend I am being smart while I'm actually just being cozy.

I'd like to do some poem writing, but that hasn't happened yet this week . . . too much other writing to do, such as that syllabus for the upcoming zoom weekend that's morphed into a sort of craft essay. I probably shouldn't waste my time writing out these little thoughts and talks; if I were a full-time teacher, I certainly wouldn't. But as it is, I end up with teaching plans that are essentially apologia speckled with discussion poems and prompts. I guess I don't know what I know, craft-wise, until I shape words around it.

I'm late writing to you this morning because T forgot to set his alarm. Thus, we had an extra, unexpected, pleasant hour of sleep followed by a silly rush, but finally I've found a moment to sit down.

Yesterday was packed with busyness--editing and housework and snow shoveling, plus that TV interview dropped into the midst. But the interview is behind me now, and the floors are done for another week, and it didn't snow any more last night, so my day, despite the alarm silliness, should assume a more dignified pace.

I hope to get out for a walk, though I have no idea what the state of the sidewalks might be. Temperatures warmed up last night, then dropped again early this morning, so everything could be ice. I hope not, as I'm feeling a little housebound and could use a shot of wind and air and stride. But such is February in Maine.

Now laundry churns in the basement; the furnace grumbles. I dreamed about kissing a guy I have no interest in kissing in waking life, and I'm still kind of annoyed with my brain for being so obnoxious. But of course my brain could care less.

I need to run away from this letter now . . . wash the breakfast dishes, sweep up the kitchen crumbs, hang the laundry--my morning duties, day in, day out.

Yesterday, on video, I was being treated solemnly as a Poet. Today I am cleaning the cat box and scouring the sink.

Today is the day that I'm being interviewed and recorded for a Massachusetts TV program called Write Now. I admit to being a little nervous. I've got no idea what questions might be asked, and of course I picture myself stumbling and flailing. I expect I'm overreacting. Probably things will be fine. The whole situation is vanity, of course: how do I look? how do I sound? I think I would prefer to be the person who doesn't care if her hair is sticking up strangely. But I'm afraid I do care.

A few snowflakes fell as we walked out to our friends' house for dinner last night, and now I see that an inch or so has accumulated overnight on cars and sidewalks. It's Monday, back-to-work day, though really I worked for much of the weekend too, on teaching chores, judging chores, house chores, plus my Lyrical Ballads homework. Off and on I've been feeling slightly under the weather: packed sinuses and a vaguely uneasy gut--nothing debilitating but my energy level is just a little skewed.

However, onward. I'll get onto my mat this morning. I'll do some editing, and I'll sit for that interview, and I'll drink a lot of ginger tea. Rereading Emma has been a real comfort. I had long phone conversations with both of my boys yesterday, and that pleasure lingers. It was good to sit around our friends' table, and with a baby there too! I hardly ever get to spend time with babies these days, and I miss them.

I'm sure this week's news will be crammed with arrows and knives. But I did get to watch a baby happily stuff pie into his mouth with his fist. That does, for some reason, help.