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.