Today, on the first of April, my yard is still covered with snow, though slivers of ground are beginning to appear around trees and foundations. I see no sign that anything is growing, but the sun is shining. Laundry dries on the glassed-in porch. Grocery-store daffodils bloom on my kitchen table. High schoolers run on the snow-packed track, crows flap past with nesting twigs in their beaks, and I've stopped automatically pulling on snow pants every time I step outside.

This morning I had to come up with a paragraph about my poem "Home," from Same Old Story, which will be reprinted later this year in the Portland Press-Herald. I said:

This poem is from a series of diary sonnets that I wrote after spending intense time with Shakespeare's sonnets. The subject is the worst house I ever lived in: a falling-down farmhouse where everything went wrong . . . no water, no insulation, a plague of flies. The situation was frustrating and miserable, but also comic and even romantic. There we were, two people, alone together in a dank and ugly hovel, trying to pretend that we were making a home. And we were.

It's spring. Two friends who think they don't write poems have each just written the first draft of one. Another friend who thinks he is terrified of poetry has started listening to Robert Frost poems while he boils down sap. I had nothing to do with any of this. Something new is in the air.

Spring. It may not be beautiful, or kind. But it's alive, and it's what I wrote about in "Home."

When we left, a flat sunrise was threatening snow.
But the frost heaves were deep. We had to drive slow.

The Introvert's Lament

Next week I'm flying to Minneapolis for the AWP conference, where I'll mostly be staffing the CavanKerry Press table at the book fair. This will be my second AWP experience, and the first time I only spent a single day at what my friend Baron describes as Writer Circus. I was overwhelmed by the circus then; and now, as my departure date approaches, my sense of dread is increasing. It will all be fine: I will see people I like, I will find amusing things to watch, I will learn about new books and the human condition, and I will hear literature in the air. But I will still feel like a freak, and a week before departure I am already wasting way too much time fretting about what to wear--a sure sign of nerves. At least I will have a job to do when I'm there. I am proud of CavanKerry and its books, and I'm pleased that the publishers trusted me to promote them. It's good for me to join the circus, now and again. Anyway, that's what I'll keep telling myself.

Daily Courier (1918)

Dawn Potter

Influenza resulted in the loss

of Raymond A., 18 years, residing

in Dunbar until this morning.

Also Miss Grace B. age 15, of Liberty,

died early Thursday, as did David C.,

age 1 year, of North Union Township.

Mary D., small daughter, will be

interred in the Greek Cemetery.

Miss Ora E., spinster, died at her home;

likewise Mrs. Ada F., her husband

being located there with a sawmill.

Dr. Tobias G., Worshipful Master

of King Solomon’s Lodge No. 346,

now sings with the angels. On Tuesday

patient H. smiled before expiring.

Tax collector Lewis I. has lost his infant boy, J.

David K., president of Pioneer Gas,

rose to be with His Lord.

Cecil L., 13 years old, died after a brief illness.

Joseph M., miner (age unknown), collapsed.

Felix N., bachelor, age 35, perished

at the emergency hospital. The funeral

of Mrs. Catherine O. is open to all friends

tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock.

Mrs. Anna P., a young bride, has left us.

William Q., 15 years old, of So. Connellsville,

died peacefully last night. His father, John Q.,

died two weeks ago of the same malady.

Mrs. Marguerita R., 26 years of age,

is now among the elect,

though one of her sons survives.

Robert S., a well-known farmer,

crossed over this morning, as did Eli T.,

who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg

and was a pit boss. Mrs. Mary U.,

age 18, relapsed after a brief recovery.

Mrs. Nancy V., age 80, had a long life

cut short. Melvin W., infant,

slumbers in the loving arms of Jesus.

Frank X., 52 years old and born in Italy,

has left a widow and a family of children.

Rev. Charles Y. served as our priest for 16 years,

which a few may recall.

In related news,

Lieut. Arthur Z., age 23, late of Uniontown,

succumbed to his wounds.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse history of western Pennsylvania]

from A Legacy by Sybille Bedford

Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks . . . When? At the instant of calamity, at the edge of fear? when the bad news is brought, and the trap felt sprung, or the loss strikes home? At low ebb, in tedium, in accidie? In the moments of renewal? the transfiguration of love, the flush of work, the grace of a new vision, the long-held now? Or later, when the doors shut, one after another, and regret moves in the heart like a steel coil? Never as good, never as bad, but a drab, bearable half-sleep banked by a little store of this and that, subsiding after visitations and alarms, a drowsing, often not uneasy, down the years, an even-paced irreversible passage--life, the run of lives, the sum of life? Is it consoling? is it the whole truth? Is it inevitable?

A Rant about Standardized Tests

My son is a junior in high school. This May he will be taking the SAT, an AP U.S. history test, and an AP macroeconomics test. He is also scheduled to take the brand-new Maine Educational Assessment, designed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which sounds like a club for margarine fanciers.

This new margarine test will absorb significant class time. And what classes will my son miss? Why, his AP U.S. history and AP macroeconomics classes. In other words, he will compromise his scores on one set of standardized tests in order to fill out the little circles on another standardized test.

Let's talk about money: In the past, the high school has paid the costs for all juniors' SAT tests. But no more: now it is only paying for the margarine test, so I will be footing the bill for three of these delightful tests. I have not yet heard how much the SAT will cost, but together the two AP tests come to $164. I estimate that the total will be $250-300. [P.S. I will probably have to pay for another SAT test next fall.]

To recap: Boy's parents fork out a large sum of money so that Boy can take tests. Boy wants to do well on these tests that cost a large sum of money. Boy is worried about missing the classes that will help him do well on these tests that cost a large sum of money and may also affect his college admissions prospects.

Okay, you say. Wait a minute. I get why your son has to take the SAT. Most colleges still require it. But why are you, with your commitment to personalized progressive arts education, encouraging your son to sign up for AP tests. Aren't those optional?

The answer: In my son's high school, many of the upper-level honors classes have been replaced by AP classes. Ergo, anyone who wants to take honors-level physics has to take AP physics. The senior English situation is particularly silly. All seniors who want to take honors English have to take AP English . . . but they don't even take the AP exam until after they've all been accepted to colleges. If they don't take the exam, they fail the course. [And don't get me started on the fallacy of assuming that a high AP score means that you can automatically skip intro-level courses in college. You can't.]

Let's get back to the margarine test: My son is by no means the only kid in this bad position. Nearly every high-achieving junior is in exactly the same situation. Thus, many of their parents have told the school that they want their children to opt out of the margarine test. The school, however, is caught in an unpleasant bind. If all of the AP-taking juniors opt out of a state assessment, then the school's overall test scores are likely to be low. In Maine's current political climate, this means public shaming, and worse.

In sum: Throughout the United States, 11th graders are burdened with a ridiculous number of standardized tests. Why is the state torturing them with yet another high-stakes exam--and in the midst of what is already an insane standardized-test season?

How can teachers prepare students for an AP test when students cannot attend their AP classes? How can students feel confident about taking these difficult tests when they can't study for them with their teachers?

Why should a school be penalized when, by opting out of an extraneous assessment, its best students are making mature decisions about their futures?

Why, oh, why, must students, families, and schools continue to deal with these crazy Kafka-esque conundrums? If teachers cannot teach and students cannot learn, how can an assessment have any point at all?

* CavanKerry Press asked me to write a short essay about the experience of judging the 2015 state finals of New Jersey Poetry Out Loud.

* I am sorry to report that Ruckus ate a junco yesterday.

* Today is Robert Frost's birthday, and I wish I were sitting on his front porch with you. The Frost Place been getting a steady stream of applications for the 2015 Conference on Poetry and Teaching. The conference is open to anyone, teacher or otherwise, who is eager to make poetry an essential element of his or her daily life. If you teach school, lead poetry workshops, run online courses, or offer lifelong-learning classes; if you work in social service, administrative, or government settings; if you are involved in social media outreach, are frightened of/overwhelmed by/delirious about poetry; if you are longing for collegial conversation; if you have written hundreds of poems or have never written a single poem; if you primarily work in another genre but have been looking for a chance to immerse yourself in poems and poem talk and friendship, well, then the Frost Place is the place for you. Please, please consider joining us.

Yesterday afternoon I sat outside on the stoop, in the sunshine, for 10 minutes, without dying of exposure. I might snag 15 minutes out there today. Although the temperature is currently 10 degrees, it's forecast to rise to 40. But rain is on the way for tomorrow, and we still have several feet of snow on the ground. The result will be a mess. At least it will be a change.

In Harmony, at the end of March, the sap still hasn't started running in the maple trees. Gardens are hidden under snow, firewood piles are dwindling, and the big watershed rivers--the Penobscot, the Kennebec--are jammed with icebergs. Slivers of bare ground show in a few open fields where gales have torn away the snow. But a few yards further down the highway, the plow piles are so high that passing drivers can't see anything beyond them.

Everywhere, the tarmac is buckling. Town thoroughfares are pitted with holes. "Bump" warnings decorate the roadsides; "Heavy loads limited" warnings glimmer on the telephone poles. There are too many warnings to notice. Anyway, if you took your eyes off the road to read them, you'd hit the next frost heave too hard.

"This is the season of mud and trash, broken limbs and crushed briers," said Hayden Carruth. 

"Defeats and victories and / Sunlight licking the frosted windows," said Baron Wormser.

"Everything is an argument," I said.

But "I'll tell you how the Sun rose," said Emily Dickinson. And now I remember last night's moon, narrow and new, curled like a cat in a chair, framed in the windowpane above my bed.

[The Carruth line is from "Birthday Cake," in Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey; the Wormser lines are from "Mulroney," in Mulroney and Others; my line is from "Spring on Ripley Road," in Same Old Story; the Dickinson line is from Poem 318.]