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.

February. Sunday morning. Four degrees above zero. The neighborhood is draped with snow, the furnace growls without cease, and the cat has returned to bed. I'd like to light a fire in the wood stove except that I have to scrape out the ashes first, which means venturing outside, which means piling on the clothes, which requires more get-up-and-go than I have at this moment.

I spent two hours yesterday on a zoom call with Jeannie and Teresa, digging into the poems we'd all written to a common prompt, asking each other questions about how the drafts had taken shape, talking about what we were reading and how we were reading . . . In the midst of this Teresa burst out, "We're all working at such a high level!" And I thought with shock, How brave to say something like that about oneself!--to speak without boasting but with clarity and excitement and confidence. I don't know if I am quite able to mouth those words myself. Yet it was beautiful to hear them.

The American nightmare continues to unfold. Every evening I have to coach myself away from panic into sleep. But in the parallel world that is my daily life I am at the top of my game. Granted, my game is small and economically embarrassing. But I am writing well, I am reading well, I am teaching well; I am cooking good meals and managing the household and upholding my role as an interested and eager partner and parent and friend.

How long can such worlds exist in parallel? Part of the problem with being so well read is that I am all too aware of the patterns of history. I don't need to doom-scroll the daily news to recognize what I'm seeing.

What is my task as a writer of these letters? Is it to make you feel worse? Is it to act as if everything will be fine? Neither approach seems right at all. 

What do artists do in the midst of chaos and fear? They do what they can do, which is to keep making art.  And art is not one thing. It is an individual's slow and sudden interaction with materials and a moment. Every day offers a thousand variations. 

This blog has about eight regular visitors, and few of you are full-time artists. Some are serious readers. Some are serious teachers. Some are serious gadflies. Some are serious community members. Some fit artistic endeavors around the edges. Some don't.

I have no authority to offer advice, no ability either. All I can say is: The work you do matters. Keep doing it.

A fresh coating of snow fell over night, and flakes are still drifting down. It's dark outside, and the neighborhood is a mystery of gleam and shadow, a noir film.

Yesterday I wrote out my plans for the upcoming revision weekend I'll be leading, always an intense process, more like writing a private essay for myself than a creating a brisk syllabus. In making these kinds of classes I find I have to explain myself to myself, examine the workings of my own mind in order to come to any kind of settlement about what can be taught. And revision is a tricky and resistant subject, one that can bring our timidities to the fore. It is a chance for teachers to be autocrats. It is a chance for participants to be cowed. It is a chance for teachers to overlook the patterns of their own imagination. It is a chance for participants to be defensive. None of these behaviors is useful to the poem, or to us.

The chaos in Washington. Already, crowd gunfire batters our humanism and we're only two weeks into this ordeal. I turn pages, I ponder writing prompts, I scribble notes about craft and storyworld, and my attempts may as well be a dream, or a hallucination. Who do I think I am, anyway, to care so hard about these things?

Next door, my neighbor's snowblower bursts into roar. Slowly I watch his silhouette pace back and forth up his driveway. Probably he'll clear our sidewalk too. We neither ask for nor deserve this attention; we're completely capable of shoveling ourselves out. Nonetheless, he offers this kindness, repeatedly and without words.

There is no way to square such plain generosity with the contorted vengefulness that is our new regime. It is like we have been invaded by aliens. And yet, somehow, the aliens are us.

Today I will read Austen's Emma. I will read the introduction to Lyrical Ballads. I will talk to Teresa and Jeannie about poems. I will play cards and laugh with Tom. But I hear the marching.