Yesterday was not warm, but it was sunny, and I basked--first, going for a long walk with my neighbor, then spending time in the front beds ripping out a few thousand maple seedling nemeses. Talk about opportunistic: those seedlings sprout between every stone and stair. The maple empire is real. It's a wonder the houses in this town are still standing.

Today won't be any warmer, and it will likely be less sunny, but I don't think we'll get rain, so maybe I'll have a chance to decimate a few thousand more maple foot soldiers. Or maybe not, if my afternoon meeting with Teresa and Jeannie runs long, as it almost always does. We'll share our work on some common poetry prompts and we'll chatter about our reading, and somehow two or three hours will vanish in a blink. And then tonight my writing group will meet--another long busy session with poets.

So many words. I expect I'll be reeling to bed like a drunk. Meanwhile, the maple seedlings, unmoved by literature, will declare victory.

I've been writing a lot lately, not fretting about the quality of the drafts, not thinking at all about revision, let alone publication. I'm just allowing the stuff to pour out, just letting the soft shapeless thoughts harden into words. I do set myself exercises and constraints, but I don't judge the results as good or bad. As a result, my file of embryo poems is getting denser and denser; the poems are beginning to adhere to one another, no doubt, but I'm not looking at that right now. It's an interesting fugue state: this almost automatic production, this complete lack of judgment.

The older I get, the more I recognize how dangerous too-early revision is to my imaginative trajectory. Of course I do fiddle with new drafts as they appear; I do experiment with shaping and syntax and such, but I try to keep all such work generative rather than editorial: "Oooh, what if? what if?" rather than "Fix, fix, fix." I think the difference here is primarily state of mind: it feels important to encourage my brain to stay sloppy.

As the great baseball pitcher Satchell Paige advised, "Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move."

As he also said: "I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation."