Only a brief post this morning: I woke up at 3:45 a.m., convinced that I'd never fall asleep again, but promptly did, and dreamed that I was moving into an apartment in which visitors stored their iPads in the fireplace grates. Then I got up late, had to scramble to help Construction Worker Boy pack his lunch, feed the screeching hens, mix up sourdough for bread, and then suddenly Linda called to ask me to go for a walk with her to the cemetery.

In the meantime, the Poison Ivy Kid is still sleeping soundly in his tent. In the meantime, I'm not editing. In the meantime, the day is heating up, the pumpkin plant grew a foot overnight, and I'm imagining chicken and couscous salad for dinner, along with strawberry tart.

S0mewhere outside my kitchen window, an unseen bird is making seagull noises. Because I live in the middle of a forest, the possibility of an actual seagull squawking among my trees does not seem likely. But who knows? A few days ago, while I was sitting in a lawn chair at a Babe Ruth baseball game, an eagle glided over the field--very low, so close to the ground that I could easily see his talons--followed by a cranky screaming gull in hot pursuit. The eagle was considerably larger than the gull but seemed to be abashed, having been caught in some embarrassment involving the gull's nest, I presume. The triumphant bad-tempered gull chased him into a fir tree, where he sat for some time, hunched up, with his feathers all awry. He did not look much like a nation's symbol of power and prosperity. What he did look like was a formerly successful hedge fund manager with a cocaine habit and a new divorce.

Today is the day that I have to go back to work, like many of the rest of you. I am not eager, and neither are you, I daresay. Truckloads of copyediting await me, which on the one hand is good since Tom is temporarily unemployed yet on the other hand is not good since Tom is temporarily unemployed. I tell you: there's always some pressing reason not to want to work for a living.

I have nothing at all planned for the Fourth of July. This is fine with me. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind catching up with garden weeding and lawn mowing. On the other, I also wouldn't mind if it rained all day and forced me to stay inside and make a rhubarb pie while listening to the Red Sox beat the Blue Jays.

Today's menu is likely to be lime-marinated cube steaks alongside a giant salad and the aforementioned rhubarb pie, unless someone girds up his or her loins to go strawberry picking.

In the course of reading Parini's bio of Frost, I came across this poem, which reminds me of how often I have had to spend the Fourth of July making hay. My memory of haying isn't silent, however: it has a drone--regular, regular, hour after hour--the trancelike chorus of tractor, power-takeoff, bailer, and clockwork sunburnt men. I used to sing to that drone as a child, and dream of it, and I still hear it in my head.

Mowing

from A Boy's Will (1913)

Robert Frost

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound--

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Finally I've begun to allow myself to step back and look at this past week's Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Our group was somewhat smaller than we've had in past years, yet it retained its usual breadth and variety of experience: teachers from private schools and public schools, urban schools and rural schools; teachers from South Carolina, Detroit, Minneapolis, DC, New England. We had a young participant who'd never taught a class and a few who had been in the classroom for decades. We had teachers who thought of themselves as poets and teachers who were petrified of poetry.

Baron and I began the first day with our usual dictation project: that is, I read a poem out loud--in this case, Robert Frost's "Range-Finding"--and the participants copied it down, word for word, comma for comma, line for line. Then Baron asked, "What's the most important word in this poem?" And here's when the floodgates opened: not one person in that barn could tear him or herself away from this task or the adoration of this task, for the rest of the week. Every single year, the moment is a miracle.

We had two visiting poets. On Monday, Martha Carlson-Bradley spoke at length about grammar and syntax in poetry, with a particular focus on Emily Dickinson. On Tuesday, Teresa Carson spoke about drama in poetry, with readings from Browning, Keats, and Jack Wiler. Each morning the teachers shared their own classroom poetry projects, and each afternoon I gave the teachers a poem and a writing prompt, which they took back to their tents or rooms and used as inspiration for their own first-draft poems.

On Wednesday, for the first time ever, Baron and I reascended the dais and ran an all-day revision workshop, using the poems the teachers had generated from my writing prompts. Our goal was to guide them into productive classroom discussion of student work and to lead them toward simple, straightforward options for revision. My feeling is that this day went very well, but the participant evaluations will set me straight if I'm wrong. In any case, it was a good experience for me, as a coordinator of this conversation, to be able to help the participants collect their responses into a coherent conversation and also to step back and talk to them about how it feels to be the "teacher" who is orchestrating this conversation. It was a schizophrenic experience, in a useful way.

Every morning, before the other activities started, I read a passage or two from The Notebooks of Robert Frost; and in the spirit of those moments, I offer you this comment, originally from a talk that Frost gave at Wesleyan University in 1927, and quoted in Jay Parini's Robert Frost: A Life:

The freedom I'd like to give is the freedom I'd like to have. It's the freedom of my material. You might define a schoolboy as one who could recite to you everything he read last night, in the order in which he read it. That's just the opposite of what I mean by a free person. The person who has freedom of his material is the person who puts two and two together, and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time, and brought together.

Well, the Poison-Ivy Kid managed to get his swollen feet into his cleats and did, after all, take part in his first-ever Babe Ruth game. And even though Dexter lost to Howland, the boys played well. This kind of team is a new thing for Paul: everyone is a decent player, which is to say, right field is not reserved for the kid who's so bad you can't put him anywhere else. Paul has always played center field, and has always hated it because he's seen it as demeaning. No matter how often his mother tells him, "You're in center field because you can cover the entire outfield because you're fast and because you can catch the ball," he sulks. Last night, he was the kid playing right field, and he was the kid who was busy busy busy because everyone was hitting to right. He said afterwards, "Outfield's more interesting than I thought." His mother did refrain from "I told you so."

In other news, you might have gathered from Julia's comments on yesterday's post that How the Crimes Happened is a finalist for the 2011 Maine Literary Award in Poetry. Winners will be announced on July 14, but as far as I'm concerned, I wish that everyone could win. I know many people on this list, and I'm so happy for all of them.

Today's schedule: (1) Drop the Poison-Ivy Kid off for a doubleheader with Millinocket. (2) Pick strawberries. (3) Whip an extravagant amount of cream.

A couple of weirdnesses. I did my exorcism reading at the Frost Place and then opened my email, from which I learned that Guernica wants to publish "Son-in-Law" and that an NPR affiliate in Santa Cruz has recorded "Ugly Town." Two hard-to-take Harmony poems in one fell swoop. If you happen to have been in the Frost barn during my reading, you'll know why this all seems so strange and, yes, unnerving. If you weren't there, I'll explain that I wrote "Son-in-Law" at about this time last year and that its characters are based on my friend Linda and her son-in-law Steven Lake, who murdered Linda's daughter and grandchildren a couple of weeks ago. And "Ugly Town" appeared in the British journal New Walk last year. It's the poem J. E. Coetzee is rumored to like, which adds yet another layer of je-ne-sais-quoi to the situation. I haven't listened to the recording, but Ruth tells me the reader is sweeter-tempered about the poem than I tend to be.

Here I am at home, after a week at what my son James calls Poet Camp, a title that is probably more or less accurate, except that we toasted no marshmallows and no one fell into the lake. I feel like doing nothing at all, but my house says otherwise. Thus, I am washing dirty towels and sweeping a week's worth of grit off the kitchen floor and cooking what James calls "a healthy breakfast" to tide him over during today's handy-boy gig as a carpenter's assistant/coordinator of destruction. "A healthy breakfast" is a code phrase for "bacon," which according to James is a great way to improve SAT scores. It also buoys the spirits of those who are about to spend the day ripping rotten cedar shingles off the side of a house alongside their best friend's dad, whose own teenage son is away at a how-to-get-yourself-ready-to-go-to-college-someday-because-we're-worrying-you-won't program and who is thus forced to hire a teenage-son substitute to help him out with this crappy job. Ah, summer and its minimum-wage mementos.

Son #2, he of the "athlete's foot is destroying my life" phone weeping, has proven not to be suffering from athlete's foot but a serious case of poison ivy ("I didn't know that was poison ivy when I ran into the patch barefoot to look for a baseball" even though his parents have been pointing it out to him for his entire life). The result is swollen feet and legs and howling misery. I'm thinking that he won't be playing in that Babe Ruth game today.

As you can see, Poet Camp is quickly fading into a quaint memory of quiet.