Yesterday Tom and I crammed two loads of storm-damaged branches into a borrowed pickup, and he hauled them off to the dump. Then he came home and worked on the desk he's building, and I made some progress on a garden reclamation project.

On a strip of ground on one side of our driveway, some long-ago homeowner once tried to establish a perennial garden, even going so far as to make a stone stairway between our driveway and the neighbors'. But the plot has been neglected for years and is now a horrible mess of goldenrod, nightshade, burdock, maple saplings, rocks, and tree roots. For the past couple of months I have been keeping the weeds in check with a trimmer, and in the process I've uncovered some pathetic lilies and iris, a few unhappy rosebushes, and a limp peony. Now I've begun the next stage of garden recovery: spreading wheelbarrow loads of the compost-mulch I've been cooking since last fall. The mixture combines new soil from my two compost bins with last year's fallen maple leaves, which I had raked into a corner of the backyard and have been turning from time to time. My goal is to gradually spread a thick layer of the mixture on this ugly strip of ground, thus creating manageable and arable beds while suppressing the ferocious weeds. It's what a friend calls the pancake-makeup approach to gardening.

When I told Tom last fall that I was planning to keep all of the leaves that fell off our trees--and the trees are enormous, so there are many, many leaves--he was not enthusiastic, but he didn't argue. Still, I clung to what I hoped would be a good idea, though I wasn't sure the leaves would break down fast enough to be useful . . . or that I could get them out of the pile before the next batch of autumn detritus arrived. Yet here I am, less than a year later, with yards of fine free soil.

Chainsaws and giant compost piles: who knew how handy country-honed skills would be in the city?

Plus, after we finished working, we tidied up and took a long sweet walk into town for one of the best dinners out I've had in quite a while.

We're doing okay here.

The finished poem count has reached eight. I'm starting to feel like a baseball team with a win streak.

Unlike past writing sieges, this one has required physical stillness. Instead of wandering around staring out the windows or running up and down the stairs doing idle little chores, I've had to sit quietly on the couch, letting my mind perambulate and my body sag. I wonder why the creative mind requires these kinds of physical maneuvers. In a way it will be a relief to step aside from such mental bossiness and do some regular outside work this weekend. Not that I'm dying to haul storm detritus, but sitting on the couch for hours is a dangerous habit.

Between bouts of writing I've been reading John Banville's The Blue Guitar and my childhood copy of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. Yesterday, on a forced walk, I found a hardcover copy of Barbara Tuchman's The Distant Mirror in a free box. Somewhere in this house is a paperback copy of that book, which I've already read several times. But it occurred to me that a dip into the fourteenth century might be a good backup activity, so I've added it to the stack of coffee table entertainments.

And it opens with one of my favorite epigraphs of all time--a quote from John Dryden's "On the Characters in the Canterbury Tales":

For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered.

Since returning from the Frost Place I have finished--not just drafted, but finished--seven new good poems. I haven't experienced a flurry like this for years, maybe not since the early days of Chestnut Ridge, back in 2014 or thereabouts.

Every morning I sit on the couch, pull four random words out of whatever I'm reading, and immediately fall into the making lake. By good fortune my workload has been light, so I've been able to drop everything to write. That will have to change once my editing and teaching obligations start rolling in. But for the moment, I can hang on to the illusion of being invincible.

One funny thing about this trip into the zone: The act of writing isn't feeling like inspiration or exaltation or anything fuzzy at all. Instead, it all feels very prosaic and obvious. What's notable is how fast I am working. I make quick decisions about content and about structural and language elements; my sentences move swiftly. I've always been a person who writes by ear--that is, I hear a cadence before I put words to it--but those cadences in my head are particularly vibrant right now, and the voice in each poem seems to leap out fully formed.

It's like I am crackling with electricity.

The Sadness of Poets Who Are Cruel to Their Own Gifts

During the past week I have been corresponding with a friend who is struggling--as many of us surely do--with the disconnect between how he perceives his talents (as minimal) and how others perceive them (as considerable). I think there are so many ways in which we dampen our own lights. My friend remains diffident about his status as a poet and a thinker, yet to me he is an intellectual and emotional beacon. This is not flattery. This is truth. So how does the gap arise between what seems self-evident to this person who is looking at himself and what seems self-evident to the people who are watching him exist in the world?

I recognize this disconnect in myself. For instance, I know I am a good teacher and a good poet, but my lack of educational credentials is a major source of inner anxiety. As soon as other writers start chatting about their MFA programs, famous mentors and pals, etc., I fall down a hole and begin beating myself up as inconsequential, unknown, provincial, and so on and so on. Someone will yank me up out of that hole and slap me around a little, and, dazed, I'll look at her and say, "Oh. Okay. I'm fine, then." But next chance I get, I'll fall straight down the hole again. It's stupid, just like it's stupid (and I use the word in the nicest possible way) that my correspondent downplays his own inimitable gifts.

We all have our little hamster problems, and I'm tired of them. I want my friend to honor and publicize his necessary gifts. I want other friends to do the same. This world needs to hear from you all. Likewise, I want to kick my own self-loathing to the curb. I mean, what the hell? I would never judge anyone else by their diploma. So why can't I give myself the same permission?

Earlier this week I posted about the way in which, as a teacher, I try to recognize my deficiencies, try to model that recognition, try address the process of working through the ways in which I hamstring myself. I think that so many of the people I love and admire are devotees of humility. But humility is double-edged. It keeps us open and loving, but it also keeps us from throwing back our shoulders and striding into the world we long to inhabit.

So three days ago I posted all of those cozy photos of my garden, and now you get something completely different: the aftermath of yesterday's microburst: aka 30 seconds of backyard devastation. Two minutes before this happened I was sitting on the front stoop with the cat, quietly watching storm clouds move in.

By some miracle, nothing was damaged except those two lawn chairs. Branches brushed against the house and against my car, but didn't land directly on either. But what a mess! And thank goodness for Tom, who can do everything. He came home from work five minutes after the havoc, looked around in amazement, laughed and shrugged, then got out his chainsaw and went to work. Now our yard is littered with firewood and we have giant brush piles in the driveway, and it's like being back in Harmony again.

On the plus side: Tom and I have a certain comic camaraderie in such situations. Otherwise, how could we have survived Harmony for so long?

P.S. Here's a new poem, out in the currrent issue of Salamander. It's the title poem of my collection-in-embryo.

Negotiating the Poet-Teacher Balance

I drafted yet another poem yesterday. The beat goes on, apparently. And it seems that I'm not the only Frost Place person to be in the zone. Since last Friday, four participants have either shared new drafts with me, asked for revision advice, told me they were writing furiously, or talked at length about poems they were reading. Given that several of these people do not feel comfortable calling themselves poets (or, I should say, have not previously thought of themselves that way), this is a momentous turn of events. Something large has happened, creatively.

The director of any program must attend to tricky points of balance. Her job is to facilitate the session in ways that make it most useful to the participants. She cannot take her own gaps and lacks into primary consideration. In other words, she has to behave like a teacher. In my case, the irony is that I'm leading a program that focuses on breaking teachers out of that mold: that is, the impulse to neglect their own inner lives for the sake of their students' inner lives. Metaphorically, you could say that I'm working to help our participants fill their own cups so that those cups will then overflow into the lives around them.

In the process, I sometimes find myself doing exactly what I'm attempting to keep the participants from doing: that is, I put my students first, put myself last. I say sometimes because I'm aware of what's going on. And when I can do so gracefully, I try to show them that habit and model how I work to shed it. My conference is all about trying to figure things out, to consider how to integrate our responsibilities with our ideals, to deal forthrightly with our own longing to create emotionally and intellectually satisfying work even as we support others' longing to do the same.

In the privacy of my own room, I am full of arrogance about my poetic vocation. I think such inner confidence is vital. If I don't love my own work, who will? And why should I bother trying to make something that I don't value? But in the act of teaching I dowse my light. That's important: no one wants an arrogant teacher. Still, I need to figure out a way to model the vitality of this private confidence without being pompous and self-aggrandizing. I want every one of my participants to go home aflame.

It was good to have a weekend at home. I caught up on gardening, spent the afternoon with a dear young person, went out for dinner with Tom, walked in the shade. Tom started making bookshelves and a desk; I read three books and cleaned two bathrooms.

Today, housework and writing. Maybe some errand running. I've got another teaching session to plan for--an environmental-writing retreat for high schoolers--and at some point I should turn my attention to that. But for the moment I'm in between editing assignments and I don't need to travel anywhere, so in theory I've got a luxurious week of reading and writing time ahead of me. I hope I can live up to it.