A couple of new reviews have surfaced. I was very pleased to discover that A Poet's Sourcebook received a 5-star review in the Portland Book Review . . . and that's in Oregon, not Maine, which makes me even happier.

Moreover, my friend and colleague Teresa Carson has posted a review on Same Old Story's Amazon page. It's actually a snippet from the introduction she gave to my 2014 reading at the Frost Place--an introduction that practically had me in tears.

There's no friend like a friend who understands what a poet barely understands herself.

Meanwhile, the rain continues to fall. Meanwhile, I continue to read. And listen. And wait.

A steady rain is falling this morning, and the air is hurricane-heavy. Yellowing leaves gleam in the low light. A pair of chickadees taps at the feeder tray. On the rug at my feet, the poodle sighs in her sleep.

I expected to be on the road today, but my meeting was postponed; so here I am, standing at my desk staring through wet window glass into a sopping forest instead of driving for six hours in a downpour.

A few thoughts are sifting through my mind: crass ones, such as "I wonder if any of you might be willing to write an Amazon review of Same Old Story," but also tender ones, such as "I miss my college boy," which I am doing, quite intensely, at this moment.

Aren't there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
                     Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
            More often
those moments
    when roads of light and storm
    open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                      God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes. 

--from Denise Levertov, "Annunciation"

The novelist Henry Green, as I know I've mentioned here before, has become one of the touchstone writers of my life. But I'd never heard of Green before I read a John Updike essay about him in the New York Review of Books. Perhaps I read that essay a decade or so ago. Whatever the date, my first meeting with Green was long past adolescence, when I bonded with so many of my other prose infatuations.

What attracts me to Green is the way in which his writing stays so firmly in the world of his characters' physical present, yet each description is tense with the unspoken--longing and loneliness; childhood and death. The characters seem almost stupid sometimes, yet they are not, and what is clear, always clear, is that Green loves them, and his prose--so oddly contorted, so extraordinarily patient--is a way of delineating that awkward tenderness.

Here is a description from his short novel Party Going. The character is named Julia, and she is walking through a dense London fog to the train station.

Then at another turn she was on more open ground. Headlights of cars turning into a road as they swept round hooting swept their light above where she walked, illuminating lower branches of trees. As she hurried she started at each blaring horn and each time she was reassured to see leaves brilliantly green veined like marble with wet dirt and these veins reflecting each light back for a moment then it would be gone out beyond her and then was altogether gone and there was another. 

These lights would come like thoughts in darkness, in a stream, a flash and then each was away.

This is the view from the top of Bald Peak, just over the Franconia line in Easton, New Hampshire. To get to Bald Peak, you walk out the front door of the Kinsman Lodge, turn left, walk past the tennis camp, prevent your 8-eight-old nephew from dropping his borrowed ski pole down a storm drain, turn left again, find the trail head, and walk uphill for two miles.

At the top of the mountain, you ply your 8-year-old nephew with gorp, prevent him from galloping over the cliff edge, and put your hat back on because there's a brisk wind rippling across the notch and the clouds are moving fast.

At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem

 --from Denise Levertov, "The Prayer"

The Kinsman Lodge is full of dog guests who sound very funny (especially the corgis) as they bustle up and down the hall outside my room. This morning the fields outside my window are coated with frost, so all the dogs and their dog walkers must be cold as they stand around on their early morning back yard outing. I have no idea if these dogs have met before, or if this is a coincidental situation, but there are at least five dogs in this inn, though possibly I have lost count and there are more.

Sometimes I see funny things at a high school soccer game.

And sometimes I see beautiful things (with the funny things tucked into a corner).

Fortunately I did not see any ambulances.

**

Tomorrow we head west for a weekend in Franconia--my first-ever visit when I have not been working. I don't even know how to get to the park, let alone what I can do there. In theory, I'm planning to climb many heights; but a large family party spanning the ages of 8 to 74 will undoubtedly entail aches, whining, passive-aggressive reluctance, teenagers who won't get out of bed, a sudden and inconvenient need for lunch,  bossy eye rolling, the refusal to wear appropriate clothing, and chaos. I'm sure it will all be noteworthy.

P.S. 17-year-old wins the Nobel Peace Prize! Hurray for young people!

I'm gearing up for another session of wrestlemania, which is what my son's soccer teammates have been calling this afternoon's game with the opponents chronicled here. Wish us all luck. We'll need it. In the meantime, I have bread to bake and a batch of honey mushrooms to clean, slice, saute, and freeze. I do love the wild mushrooms of October.

I'm also working, of course--editing a book about Audre Lorde and checking proofs of my own book, The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet, which is getting closer and closer to publication. I hadn't reread those chapters since last winter, so I was worried that I might have learned to hate them. But you know, they're not bad; they really aren't bad. Here's a bit from chapter 1, which eventually moves on to a study of Shakespeare's sonnet 81.

What’s the Most Important Word? 

On the surface, this is one of the simplest questions a reader can ask about any poem. Words are words: any English reader, however innocent or sophisticated, can identify them, react to them, and talk to each other about them.
            Words are also a poet’s solid artisan materials, which she grasps and throws down and grasps again as she struggles to construct a poem out of silence. In this way, making a poem is very much like building a stone wall. Poets create something out of nothing; they use words to shape what has, till now, been wordless. “How should this grief be properly put into words?” is how Roman poet Horace chose to open his ode “To Virgil.” The way in which he wrestled with that question is the way in which he created the poem.
            So when a reader asks, “What’s the most important word?” she’s starting to think about a poem as a poet thinks about it. She’s also starting to realize that her answer is impermanent. Great art, unlike so much else in our daily lives, requires us to come to terms with our own fluidity. As a reader becomes more familiar with the poem, her choice may change. As she grows older, her choice may change. As she experiences some momentous event in her own life, her choice may change. These shifts are themselves part of the ongoing poetic conversation; in some sense, they become part of the poem itself. A reader with a long, intense relationship with a particular poem might even agree with Adrienne Rich, who wrote in “Images of Godard” that “the moment of change is the only poem.”