As expected, I did not get to everything on yesterday's list, but I did manage to do a lot of it. I finished an editing project, I worked on a poem draft, I cleaned house, and, best of all, I shoveled the entire soil delivery into the garden boxes, set up my tomato stakes, and sowed spinach, arugula, and lettuce. Today I'll work on high school plans and prep for Saturday's festival, and then I'll slip out to the nursery to buy a flat of annuals for my flower pots. If I can get them planted this afternoon and do a bit of weeding in the front beds, the domain will be in good shape for the weekend rains.

On Saturday Betsy Sholl and I will be talking together about two poems, one from each of our recent books. (We had to submit these poems early so that the University of Maine at Augusta students could read them in class, and copies will be floating around the festival, which for some reason I find slightly nerve-racking.) We've come up with a variety of questions to ask one another, but I still don't feel exactly ready transition-wise, so that's what I need to do this morning: actually plot out how we might move from thought to thought. At their best, staged conversations have a patina of ease, but without planning they can devolve into unbalanced glop, or a series of sidebars, or one long um. Performance is complex, even when it's not supposed to look like performance.

As an introvert who is also a performer, I've had to think a lot about exactly how to put on a show. My sort is pretty common, I've found, and not just among poets. Introversion and art making go together--all that alone time, all that obsessiveness. Lots of actors, teachers, musicians, writers, and dancers are happiest in an empty room. I daresay the same goes for athletes. But most of us need to put on a show now and again and thus we need to figure out how to conduct and construct ourselves on stage. Speaking: it's a whole other level of work, very different from the daily tasks of reading, writing, revising, or organizing a manuscript.

So that's today's job: plotting out an hour's staged conversation. You could call this stage blocking, I guess: figuring out what question goes where, whose response moves where, what thought leads to what other thought, how much time each segment will take, which poet steps up to the footlights, which steps back into the shadows . . .