It rained and wet-snowed most of yesterday, but today is forecast to be sunny, and I'm looking forward to an afternoon walk, once the ice clears. Surely I'll see more snowdrops today. Already in my own yard the shapes of the garden boxes are starting to reappear, and with a little more melting I'll glimpse the first garlic spears poking up among the leaves.

I went out to write last night, which gave me a couple of new drafts to play with. That's good because my day is pretty loose, work-wise. I finished up an editing project yesterday and haven't received a new one yet, so now is a fine time to mess around with a few poems. But I'll also keep chipping away at my conference planning, and I've still got that spring generative-writing workshop to organize. It's not like I ever have nothing to do.

I know I told you that the April 19 Poetry Kitchen workshop is full. The May 3 session is also filling, but there are still a few spaces left, if you've got any interest in writing with me that day. Likewise, the Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts is now two-thirds full, but space still waits for you. And if you have any ability to sponsor scholarships to the Monson Arts conference, I would be so incredibly grateful. We have several applicants this year, all without access to institutional funding, and I would love to make sure that they can all attend.

I've been considering running an online-only, abbreviated taste of the conference, probably later in the summer, probably just a day or two long. If that's something you'd be interested in, let me know.

This week is whipping past, I suppose because I've been on the road for a third of it and disrupted from my home schedule. It's hard to believe it's Thursday already--not that I'm complaining, because Thursday is writing-with-my-poets night and that is always good. But I do feel slightly breathless about time.

I did see a snowdrop yesterday, just a single bud, hoisting itself from the slush. And today we'll have rain, so I expect to be spotting more very soon. My own gardens are still buried in snow, but after the next few days of rain they, too, may start showing their colors.

Everywhere on my walk yesterday the neighborhood cardinals were singing, woodpeckers were hammering, crows were sailing, bluejays were plundering. The birds are busy, busy, and the squirrels are rushing across the snowy yards, skittering up the fat trunks of the maples, their mouths stuffed with leaves--repairing their nests, getting ready for babies.

And the sky is a wild rush--sun and breeze and cloud. Sand skitters in the gutters, and dogs tug at their leashes, and teenagers insist on wearing miniskirts to school, and poets pull off their knitted hats and let their heads be cold because the air is too exhilarating to resist.

Home again, in warmish, dripping Portland, Maine. We still have a thick snowpack, but all night chunks of snow and ice slid noisily off the roof as snowmelt pecked at the windows and vents. Today is forecast to be sunny and 45 degrees, and after a month of ice and cold I am itching to get outside, especially after hours spent in the classroom and the car. Maybe I'll see the first blooming snowdrops! I am excited to find out.

Yesterday was the final session in my big three-class revision event, and in two weeks my son will be with me to lead a fun day on scriptwriting. He'll be staying with us for a week, first teaching with me, then attending a several-day wilderness first responder class that he needs for his summer canoe job. It will be such a treat to have him around for so long--something to look forward to in March, a notably aggravating month in the north country.

Today I'll be back to editing in the morning, running errands in the afternoon, catching up on laundry and reading . . . the usual minutiae of my life. I've got a stack of poem drafts that I've been working on steadily for the past week, and I'm pleased with how they're opening up, how they're surprising me. It's been instructive to move from one to the other, noting how each requires a different reading, a different ear, a different experiment.

My thoughts about Nicholas Nickleby still linger. I've been playing with his "precision of exaggeration" in these drafts . . . and it is feeling like an important revision layer, one that intimately affects dramatic movement. None of these poems is long; a couple are extremely small; but that makes the need for dramatic control even more delicate and specific.

This work I do never stops thrilling me.

I expected to spend the evening alone in my apartment, but instead I ended up sitting around with the Monson Arts chef and her husband and one of the resident artists, drinking red wine, eating lamb and greens, and having an unexpectedly social night. It was a lovely surprise, as was the long intense sleep I fell into afterward.

And so here I am, the next morning, lolling and yawning, in no hurry at all to get up and get going. Yes, I've got a full day of teaching ahead and a long drive home, but there is a holiday pleasure in not leaping out of bed at 5 a.m. and hurtling directly into chores.

The battery on my laptop is running down, so I will end this note and coax myself out of bed and into the shower and onto my workday. And when I step outside a faint scent of spring will rise from the grimy snowpack.

The weekend was quiet, undemanding, and friendly, with plenty of sleep, good opener to a packed week. I head north this afternoon, teach tomorrow, and then on Wednesday I'll be back in the editing saddle, a backup singer belting other people's tunes. [Ah, mixed metaphors: how you amuse me.]

I finished Nicholas Nickleby yesterday--800 pages devoured in less than a week. I will say I felt a little sad that no one responded to my excitement about his precision of exaggeration. It felt important to me, a discovery, a specific recognition of a specific tool for intensifying a writer's and reader's engagement. But of course my thrills aren't yours, and few people adore Dickens today, let alone view him as a craft model. I shouldn't take it to heart.

I am sixty years old and I am still rereading books that I first read at the age of twelve or thirteen. Most prominent of these are the novels of Dickens. No writer has affected me more. The other day, after sitting in on my online class, Teresa pointed out the gothic echoes in one of my poems. She wondered about a Poe influence. "Dickens," I said, "of course Dickens." He infects my sentence rhythms, my grammar, my word choice, my taste for melodrama, my tragicomic characters, my sentimental home scenes, my social commentary. He is everywhere in my creative life, peering over my shoulder as I peer over his.

Part of what makes him indispensable (to me, I mean; most other people find him dispensable enough) is how exact he is in his exaggerations . . . which sounds like an oxymoron, but read this passage from Nicholas Nickleby to see what I mean:

It is observable that when people upon the stage are in any strait involving the very last extremity of weakness and exhaustion, they invariably perform feats of strength requiring great ingenuity and muscular power. Thus, a wounded prince or bandit-chief, who is bleeding to death and too faint to move, except to the softest music (and then only upon his hands and knees), shall be seen to approach a cottage door for aid, in such a series of writhings and twisting, and with such curlings up of the legs, and such rollings over and over, and such gettings up and tumblings down again, as could never be achieved save by a very strong man skilled in posture-making. And so natural did this sort of performance come to Mr. Snittle Timberry that on their way out of the theatre and towards the tavern where the supper was to be holden, he testified [to] the severity of his recent indisposition and its wasting effects upon the nervous system, by a series of gymnastic performances which were the admiration of all witnesses.

Look at his precision in describing theatrical overacting; look at how overboard he goes in that precision; look at how he then transfers that description seamlessly into the absurd public behavior of an extremely minor character who appears only briefly late in the novel . . . which is to say, Dickens puts this level of descriptive intensity into even the throwaway elements of his narrative. This is the kind of stuff that killed me when I was a kid, and it still kills me. 

I could talk forever about Dickens but one other thing I've been noticing on this rereading of Nicholas Nickleby is his commentary on working-class women: specifically, the contrast between actresses and seamstresses. The women actors are lively, self-confident, talkative, and full of power. They hold equal status with the men actors; they make decisions for themselves, both in life and on the stage. Yes, they are silly and grubby and down-at-heel, but they are essentially happy. In comparison, the seamstresses are wan and pale and meek. They are at the mercy of unscrupulous men. They are derided by fashionable women. Yes, these are Victorian tropes for suffering virtue. But the seamstresses have no fun. And the actresses have so much fun.

Certainly Dickens, in his personal life, was deeply confused by the cult of pure womanhood that he himself promoted in his genteel characters. But when he was able to slip out of those blinders and look at real working women, he saw things clearly enough.

Maybe I love Dickens in part because I sympathize with his murky longings (often unreal and ridiculous, and don't we all have them?) and am wholly in love with the incisive clarity of his exaggerations. So what if his novels are sentimental? So what if his social answers are too easy? No one else has ever created such worlds-on-paper . . . crowded and dirty and brawling and beautiful.

It's Saturday morning, and I wallowed in bed till 6. I don't have to teach either day this weekend or travel anywhere, and though I have things to do, I can do them whenever I feel like it.

What I feel like doing right now is sitting here in my couch corner, wrapped in my shabby red bathrobe, peacefully drinking strong black coffee, and staring out into the lavender sky. It's cold out there, just 7 degrees, but the middays are thawing a bit. There was even a little melting in progress yesterday, when Betsy and I were out on our walk. Maple sap starts to run in this kind of weather, on these bright days and frigid nights, and my sap starts to run too. In the firmament the red-tailed hawks are courting, and down on the prosaic ground I lift my muzzle like a dog, snuffing up the first faint whiffs of change.

During our walk Betsy and I talk about poem revision, our own and other people's: what is the resistance? what is the sudden dazzle? She is planning a talk about Cavafy, and I am immersed in Lyrical Ballads, and we are clumping along the cemetery paths, two mild-mannered aging ladies out for an afternoon constitutional, our brains stuffed with roses and briars. I have a teenage urge to giggle. Poetry as disguise, as secret handshake. Bet you don't know what we're thinking.