Poet 2.0

National Novel Writing Month

2011-11-08T14:16:00.000-05:00

As most of you know, this month is National Novel Writing Month (or Nanowrimo) and this year, I've decided to join in. I know, I know. I'm not a fiction writer. I'm a poet. But ever since I left Pennsylvania, I haven't been able to shake the story of the town of Pithole, an oil boom town from the late 1860s. The history of the town and the characters who lived there have been under my skin for the past six months. I've written endless poems about them (a whole book of them if you can believe) but still can't shake the characters. So, I'm trying to write myself out of Pithole with a novel. Or, rather, something which will be more like a novella. So far, I've written just under 5000 words and I'm still going strong.

What Sappho and Online Learning Have in Common

2011-10-31T15:30:00.000-04:00

Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching a f2f workshop on online learning in Clarion, PA. The class was made up of about 20 professors who teach women's studies courses across Pennsylvania. It was a great workshop! One of the topics we spoke about what how when you teach online, you need to think like Sappho. Don't be stifled by technology as it is. Instead, reinvent it! In one of Sappho's most famous fragments, fragment 31, she writes the following:
That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech

In this poem, she compares the man who gets to sit next to the women she loves to a god. Now, in Greek poetry before Sappho (most famously in Homer) the only people who were compared to Gods were war heroes. But, Sappho wasn't talking about war, she was talking about love and she needed a way to embody the emotion she was writing about it. So, she thought differently and reinvented an existing motif.

When we think about how to use technology to enhance our online classes, we have to think the same way. Not, what is the technology and how is it best used. Rather, how can I reinvent this technology in order to best use it in my class.

And the lucky winners are ...

2011-05-01T15:19:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone who participated in my National Poetry Month free book give away. I used the random number generator at random.org to choose a winner of the contest and the lucky winner is comment #5 O.P.W. Fredericks. Congratulations!

I'm happy to report that I wrote a poem a day throughout April. Yeah! Below are links to two of my new poems published on Thin Air magazine's blog: The Ring and Interrupted Geographies.

Hope everyone had a wonderful National Poetry Month!

The Big Poetry Giveaway! 2011

2011-03-30T22:15:00.000-04:00

This month, I will be participating in two wonderful events in honor of National Poetry Month -

NaPoWriMo - where I will write a poem a day, every day for 30 days (more about this soon...) and,
The Big Poetry Giveaway! 2011 - where I will give a copy of my chapbook Inheritance AND a copy of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. The Big Poetry Giveaway is organized by Kelli Russell Agodon (see http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2011/03/big-poetry-giveaway-2011.html for more information).

If you would like me to send you a copy of both my book and Gertrude Stein's book (for free!) just post a comment on my blog with your name and contact information. At the end of April, I will randomly choose one name and send off a copy of both books in the mail. For more information about Gertrude Stein's book and my book, please see below. Good luck!

Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms from 1914. In this book Stein reinvigorates words. One of my all time favorite books of poetry
.

My book, Inheritance was published by Finishing Line Press in June 2010. It is a sonnet sequence of American sonnets.

My Door Poem - a Spoof on the Greek/Roman Form, Paraclausithyron

2010-11-13T01:23:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to say my new poem, "Door Poem Between the Self and the Heart" was just published on The Open Doors Poetry Zine. My poem is a spoof of the Roman form where lovers were kept out of the bed chambers of their beloved and instead wrote poems to door that seperated them. The Latin Love elegists were big on the Paraclausithyron which literally translated means, ""beside closed door". My poem plays on this theme changing the conversation in the poem to be between a pre-discovered self and a another self on the other side of the door.

New Poems Featured at Raft

2010-10-30T10:07:00.000-04:00

Three of my new poems (inclusing audio files) are featured on the new online literary magazine Raft. These are poems where I was experimenting with form - two poems that use adapted computer code (javascript, perl and a little splash of xml) to write lyrics. Another poem, "Dear Real Life" is an exploded sonnet - a sonnet that speaks in two voices written in two columns.

November is Poem a Day Month too!

2010-10-30T09:56:00.000-04:00

Beginning November 1, I will be participating in another poem-a-day excercise throughout the month thanks to the lovely California poet, Molly Fisk. There is something so powerful about a daily writing practice (it's how my book Inheritance came about! Writing a poem a day riding the subway into and out of Manhattan from Brooklyn.) I'm looking forward to whatever comes about!

What the Titanic can teach us about teaching writing

2010-06-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

Ocean Explorer Robert Ballard's Ted Talk inspired me recently. During the beginning of his talk he asserts that everything he needed to know in order to do his job well he did not learn in college. Science was changing so fast while he was in college that by the time his Professors taught him theories he already knew what he was learning was obsolete. But instead of challenging the teachers he lied on his tests in order to get an A. Ballard's point made me think about the steep learning curve we face teaching students how to write using a multitude of mediums the workforce today. Once we become adept at micro blogging and have successfully developed curriculum to teach students how to use twitter as a communications vehicle in the real world will it be obsolete? Maybe, who knows! Since it's almost impossible to keep up with all of the new mediums, seems like we should leave ourselves open to our students' expertise in using collaborative technology in order to keep up with the curve. What would Ballard's teacher's have learned had he been taught in a more collaborative environment?

Writing it Real - Shirley Jackson's Memoir Life Among the Savages

2010-05-24T19:44:00.000-04:00

I am completely enjoying reading Shirley Jackson's memoir about motherhood entitled, Life Among the Savages. Thanks to Ayelet Waldman who recommended the text as a "real" account of parenthood (aka the good, the bad, and the ugly about what it is like to raise young children). Jackson (who most famously wrote the chilling, highly anthologized short story, "The Lottery") is writing about parenting her three small children in rural Vermont (after just having left New York City) in the early 1950s. Jackson's tales may have been written over half a century ago, but her accounts of her oldest son's terrible first weeks of Kindergarten, her daughters cast of imaginary friends, could have been written yesterday. If you are looking for a well-written, hilarious read about what it is really like to be a parent, I highly recommend this book.

There is much to be learned about how collaborative technologies can change the way we teach and interact with literature

2010-05-13T10:57:00.001-04:00

There is much to be learned about how collaborative technologies can change the way we teach and interact with literature. As a recent Ph.D. with ten years experience working at a Fortune 100 technology company, I know how powerful collaborative technologies can be; however, rarely do you see the right technologies facilitating collaboration within the creative writing and literature classroom and beyond. Students who are constantly updating and checking their Facebook status page will not engage in a discussion driven by a text-heavy PowerPoint slide deck delivered in a darkly lit room. But how will they engage? Do we need to constantly entertain the tweeting youth in order to keep them engaged in the Higher education classroom? Does every college student learn in exactly the same way? No, and no. Technology (especially collaborative technology) evolves because people adapt it to solve problems. My approach to integrating collaborative technology into my creative writing and literature classrooms is to encourage collaboration, expand the modalities used to reach a larger breadth of students, and to open the doors of the classroom to the greater community.
What can we learn from Facebook and Twitter about teaching a poem?
A great deal, some examples are:

• The Wisdom of the Crowd – students constantly interact with content on the web. Why not create a learning environment where students can comment on, rate, share and recommend poems?

• Ambient intimacy - Typical students have 100s of Facebook friends but only respond and interact with a core group. They do, however, glean information about many more friends through ambient intimacy. Ambient intimacy is the indirect relationship achieved by reading and following someone’s microblog posts. Why not encourage students to follow key microbloggers and bloggers who are experts on the topics you are covering in the course? Who knows what they may learn by following these threads?

• Microblogging as a creative tool – writing Twaiku, or poems written in the 140 character-limit form of microblogging can teach students about the power found in brevity. How about requiring 140 character responses to specific poems?
The Collaborative Classroom
Collaborative technologies extend our reach in the classroom by allowing us to create an online community where students can feel empowered to interact with content. Not every student will understand a poem by H.D. by reading it on the page, but by including a video clip and an audio file or by encouraging students to comment on poems and interact with their peers about a poem, more students may come to understand H.D.’s work. The other area where students can be empowered in the Web 2.0 space is in collaborative research. In many American survey courses students listen to one-way lectures and skim through an anthology, with little interaction with the work. But I believe topics like American literature can be opened up especially in the online classroom. By encouraging students to engage and empowering them to do so. How did American literature come to be American literature? How did Alice Walker stumble upon Zora Neale Hurston’s work? Serendipity. By looking for what was not yet there. By introducing students to online databases and resources and teaching them how to access this information and encouraging them to believe that the American canon is a living thing, ever changing, and that they, too, can discover great works of art they feel empowered to look and read more closely.
Video/TelePresence
There are technologies available today where video quality is so high that the person viewed appears real, as if she were sitting across the table for you. Think about the possibilities these technologies could offer up to students? Speakers from around the world could visit the classroom, sharing their knowledge and interacting with the students.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but rather a drop in the bucket. Technology is not something that should be thought of an additional peripheral tool that can/can’t be added to enhance a class. It should be thought of as part of the organic experience of the learning environment, especially within the humanities. The question isn’t what technology can I use to enhance this lesson? It’s more symbiotic - how does this lesson evolve using technology/ how do we evolve this technology to enhance teaching? How can we re-think how we think about texts by using technology? It’s also important not to use technology just to use technology. All technologies are not equal and will not solve the same problems. I’m looking forward to future research in this area – how to evolve how we think about using technologies in the Creative writing classroom not as a means to draw more students to our classrooms but as a means to teach better.

Maximize the Surface Area Where Serendipity Can Happen - Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco

2010-05-12T12:45:00.002-04:00

Of course there were no sessions dedicated to the connected/collaborative classroom at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, but a number of the keynote speakers had inspirational messages that could easily be applied to the use and application of Web 2.0 technology in higher education learning.

One key point was the switch to thinking about Web 2.0 technologies as technologies that are driven by and evolve based on people and how they use these technologies. Most of the big advances that have happened in the New Media space have happened because people have invented new ways to use existing technologies in new and interesting ways (ways that the developers of these technologies never dreamt of) to maximize the surface area where serendipity can happen.

In the higher education space it seems like we could learn a lot from our own students...how do they currently use social media to consume/interact with content? Also, how do we move away from the "all or nothing" philosophy? What is we were to allow students to interact with content in multiple mediums? There is a time and place for video, microblogging, podcasts, as well as regular, face-to-face interactive lectures...how do we learn as educators how to choose the right medium for the content we are teaching? And how do we accommodate the different types of learners in our classroom by providing content in multiply mediums.
Interesting Keynotes from Web 2.0 Web Expo to check out -

June Cohen of Ted Talks - Ideas Worth Spreading
Ge Wang of Stanford University - Breaking Barriers with Sound

30 Days / 30 Poems

2010-05-02T16:29:00.003-04:00

I've just finished writing a poem a day during the entire month of April thanks to the daily prompts provided by readwritepoem.org. I don't know what will come of all of this writing (or how much of it is salvageable) but the practice of daily writing was truly amazing. Hmmm...maybe I should do this more than one month out of the year?

100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teaching Students About Social Media

2009-06-25T15:02:00.001-04:00

100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teaching Students About Social Media

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Thirst

2007-03-03T20:58:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Amy Lowell's most famous biography lately (by S. Foster Damon). It's fascinating. It's so interspersed with excerpts from her letters that it's almost as if Amy is telling the story herself. I've been thinking a lot about Lowell's intense sense of place and how her home permeated so much of her work. Lowell grew up in a house named Sevenels, just outside of Boston, then stayed in the home (after renovating it) after her parents died. So, her sense of place was deeply rooted. Her childhood, her adulthood, were both intertwined and lay rooted in the soil of her family home.

She had a unique way of taking anything she learned about - but especially the classics - and planting it in Boston. She was never formally educated in the classics. But she read them voraciously throughout her life. Perhaps her lack of formal education, the fact that she came across these poets eye-to-eye as a poet, made her feel more comfortable renovating their themes and motifs into the new, modern landscape of America. She called Sappho "a burning birch tree" and replaced Arcadian meadows with the flora and fauna of the sunken garden of her estate in Boston. I think this aspect makes her a very American poet. And I think that the audacity of her poems (paired with the sheer honesty and confessional quality of them) was greatly influential on the writers in the generation that would follow her.

I think one of the loveliest versions of Lowell's Boston-Grecian themes is found in ΔΙΨΑ (Thirst) from A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912):

Look, Dear, how bright the moonlight is to-night!
See where it casts the shadow of that tree
Far out upon the grass. And every gust
Of light night wind comes laden with the scent
Of opening flowers which never bloom by day:
Night-scented stocks, and four-o'clocks, and that
Pale yellow disk, upreared on its tall stalk,
The evening primrose, comrade of the stars.
It seems as though the garden which you love
Were like a swinging censer, its incense
Floating before us as a reverent act
To sanctify and bless our night of love.
Tell me once more you love me, that 't is you
Yes, really you, I touch, so, with my hand;
And tell me it is by your own free will
That you are here, and that you like to be
Just here, with me, under this sailing pine...

A Birthday: Keats at Dawn, Sushi and Lear

2007-02-04T21:04:00.000-05:00

This was my birthday weekend. And it was certainly a catalog of extremes (which seems fit, given my life these days).

1. Friday at dawn. I couldn't sleep so I came downstairs and read Keat's letters (for the first time). Had many revelations about my dissertation topic, none of which have solidified.

2. Friday night. WENT OUT. with new and old dear friends. Ate emense amounst of sushi (see before and after photo below).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

3. Sunday. Went to the Folger Shakespeare Library and saw King Lear. Lear roared on the stage. Almost naked. His hair seemingly aflame with insanity. Had more revelations about my dissertation topic.

4. Sunday night. Jackson gave me a birthday card where he actually wrote his and Max's name in legibile letters. Amazing.

Needless to say, it was an incredible weekend!

To Launder or not to Launder...

2007-01-30T14:51:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in my basement right now completely ignoring the immense pile of clothes I have to fold. There is this quiet nagging voice in my head (it's been there since about the time I had my first child) that keeps telling me to go into the other room and fold the laundry (by the way, it is also telling me to get dinner going, pick up the living room, empty the dishwasher and take out the trash). I was never a slob growing up, but I never really though about housekeeping the way some of my other girlfriends did in college. Maybe it was because I always had my nose in a book, or I was thinking about a poem I was working on, I don't know. But, somewhere between here and there I developed this voice in my head. The one that won't let me go to bed without picking up the kitchen, getting the coffee ready and starting the dishwasher. I remember consciously watching my mother go through her evening thousand thinking that will never be me. It's strange how things change. I guess out of a sense of necessity. If I don't turn on the dishwasher, Maxi won't have any clean bottles in the morning. And if I don't get the coffee ready in advance, I'll have to try and fumbled through making it in the morning. When, given the sleep deprivation I've experienced lately due to sick kids, who knows what could happen. But, in the end, during brief periods of the day, I have control of the voice. Yes, I could be folding laundry now. But, it feels so nice not to!

Mama Gonna Knock You Out

2007-01-25T21:39:00.000-05:00

Lately, I've been intellectualized lyrics by L.L. Cool Jay as I run on the treadmill. Maybe that's because I've been teaching hyperbole to my 7th graders, but I think it is more likely a sign that I need to get back to the books. I've taken almost two months off from my program and I'm itching to get back into it. If only the children could pick themselves up from school, make their own dinner and put themselves in bed! I'd have ample time to get back to it! : )

It is strange to be this side of the exams. To know that all that I need to study now is what I want to study. I've been gorging myself on books on Sappho. (I've actually found the edition that H.D. and Amy Lowell referred studied her from and it is surprisingly good!) I've also been applying for jobs at community colleges. I've definitely realized that teaching 7th grade English is not something I can do even for a little while.

D.C. finally got snow on Monday. We got a dusting, but schools were delayed by 2 hours. It was a great treat to have a slow morning and not have to rush the kids (and myself) of to school. It's funny how little snow shuts this city down. When I was in college there was a blizzard and it shut the whole city down for over a week.

In the spirit of getting back into the swing of my studies, I thought I would post a poem by Amy Lowell. This one is called "Generations" and is taken from her collection Pictures of the Floating World.

Generations

You are like a stem
of a young beech-tree,
straight and swaying,
Breaking out in golden leaves.
Your walk is like the blowing of beechtree
On a hill.
Your voice is like leaves
Softly struck upon by a South wind.
Your shadow is no shadow, but a scattered sunshine;
At night you pull the sun down to you
And hood yourself in stars.

But I am like a great oak under a cloudy sky,
Watching a stripling beech grow up at my feet.

It's not her best poem. But it is a poem that really showcases Lowell's style. She didn't fear repetition (repeating beech). And the clarity and emotional breadth that radiates from her images is gorgeous (the last two lines of the first stanza).

Christmas in Washinton D.C.

2006-12-27T21:41:00.000-05:00

The sky is blue. There is no snow. This Christmas was so different from the last four we've spent in Cleveland, OH. Winter was something you put on and carried for months in Ohio. A thick coat. It was, as one of my friends once put it, an escape from the pressures of the outdoors. It was a chance to sit still, or bury oneself beneath bundles of clothes and face the bite of cold.

Last night, we went to see the tree that is in front of the Capitol. And for the first time this winter, we felt cold. The wind was one of those that bites through your clothes. The tree was beautiful. Blue, purple and gold lights and behind the tree that majestic stretch of the mall from the reflecting pool, to the Washington Monument (or as my son calls it, "the pencil"). There is something about D.C. in the dark. All of that granite and history weighing on you as you look at it.

Form as Meaning

2006-10-19T10:42:00.000-04:00

I am listening to a Japanese pop song (off the songtrack to Lost in Translation) while I work on my questions this morning and I am absolutely struck by the way form carries over even without language. I don't understand Japanese, but I know this song is a pop song immediately when I listen to it and I am just as struck by the pop form (just as I would be if this song were in English, only I have left of a tendency to sing along when the song is in Japanese [ which is why I am listening to it while I am working on my questions]. I don't know why, but this really struck me this morning. Maybe it's because I am writing about the differences between form in poetry. Who knows. I guess it is the structure and sound of something that reaches the listener (or reader for the matter) above all else and creates the immediate emotional response. I wish I could place a soundclip in here so you could hear the song I am talking about, but I have no idea how to do that. The song is called, "Kaze Wo Atsumete." But if you speak Japanese, don't tell me what it means. Just like Randall Jarrell in "Deutsch Durch Freud," I prefer to not to completely understand, to just have the gist of it, as it floats down to me in its silly little pop form.

Ah...Merwin

2006-10-01T16:43:00.000-04:00

"Exercise"
by W.S. Merwin

Exercise

First forget
what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly
every day
then forget
what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week

then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a weekwith as few breaks as possible
follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later to forget how to count
forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again
go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire
forget fire

I was debating whether or not to go for a sort run to try and clear the cobwebs from my brain so I can write again and I came across this poem by Merwin. He is so elementally lyric. And I always think of him, with his boyish smile, walking through the rainforests of Maui. He must be in his 70s now, but to me, he'll always be 40 or so (however old he was on the cover of some anthology I read where I fell in love with him for the first time). I am spending the day writing on my questions. Matt took the kids to his aunt's house. I think one of my questions is done. Now, just three to go. I am working on getting up the momentum to begin another one and procrastinating with poems once again.

7th grade...what was I thinking?

2006-09-21T21:52:00.000-04:00

Blogging as a procrastination device

2006-09-10T00:03:00.000-04:00

Ok, now that I am writing at least one of my questions, blogging and reading poetry has become a procrastination device. I just picked up Alice Notely. Just plucked The Descent of Alette off the shelf and all of these loose-leaf poems I'd tucked in the paperback. Treasures. I've no idea what book they are from. They are just poems by Alice Notely. Like this, the opening poem from her book-length poem, "The Descent of Alette":

"One day, I awoke" "& found myself on" "a subway, endlessly"
"I didn't know" "how I'd arrived there or" "who was I" "exactly"
"But I knew the train" "knew riding it" "knew the look of"
"those about me" "I gradually became aware--" "thought it seemed

as that happened" "that I'd always" "known it too--" "that there was"
"a tyrant" "a man in charge of" "the fact" "that we were"
"below the ground" "endlessly riding" "our trains, never surfacing"
"A man who" "would make you pay" "so much" "to leave the subway"

"that you don't" "ever ask" "how much it is" "It is, in effect"
"all of you, & more" "Most of which you already" "pay to
live below" "But he would literally" "take your soul" "Which is
what you are" "below the ground" "Your soul""your soul rides

"this subway" "I saw" "on the subway a" "world of souls"

I find her work stunning. (And in direct conversation with Pound's Metro now that I think of it.) And the breath-pause created by the quotations is aurally both hypnotic and abrasive (in a subway car, jerking sort-of-way). Descent, is Notely's epic poem about unearthing her female voice.

Ok, I've got to stop procrastinating...

Islanded

2006-09-09T19:20:00.000-04:00

I islanded myself in the world of Manhatten for a night last night -- sans children. I had, there and back, eight solid hours of reading on the train which proved immensely productive. So, when I stepped onto the platform at Penn station, I was myself islanded in metaphor theory, and H.D. criticism. I was islanded between myself before children and after children. The subway just smelled good when I got on it and headed downtown to West 4th (one of my poet friend later mentioned what I might have been smelling was nostalgia, and the freedom of my old life). Melissa Hammerle is leaving NYU CWP, so I went to pay tribute for all of her support. The reception was in the building where I had last faced Donoghue (spelling?), who now, I just fondly refute in the marfins of my reading. Then, after, we went to Cedar bar. I was surrounded by writers. Generations of them, all of whom Melissa had kindly supported during her tenure.

It was good to be in NYC. (The first time in five years!!!) but also, surprisingly, nice to leave it this morning, to get on a train and read and write, and return to my quieter domestic exsistence here in D.C.

2006-08-28T21:09:00.000-04:00

Well, I've begun to teach 7th grade.

It is quite a change from teaching college. For one thing, there are FIVE classes! It's a long day. I see a lot of caffeine in my future. Then there's the classroom discipline thing -- you have to do a lot of getting everybody back on task. Besides that, teaching is teaching.

Jackson started pre-school today. He loved it. He wears a little uniform (a yellow polo shirt and khaki shorts -- he looks so cute!). Maxy had his first birthday last week. (That's why he's wearing a little plaid suit in the photo. Also pictured in the photo holding him is my host mother from Germany - Gaby. She and Rolf, my host father, visited us all last week. It was wonderful to see them again.) I can't beleive Max is already a year old! He really enjoyed being the center of attention for a day. It was great.

2006-08-14T10:49:00.000-04:00

Ok - I'm trying to make a table of contents and MY GOD! How do you line all of those little numbers up? There has got to be some little plug-in on program I could use to make my table of contents without having to "eye it" as I am trying to do (and let me tell you - I don't have a good eye!).

But, the fact that I am writing a table of contents at all proves that yes, indeed, I have sucessfully collaged together yet another version of my first book manuscript. Now I have two chapbooks and a book manuscript to circulate. Now I guess I just send out and send out and send out and send out.

2006-08-07T16:09:00.000-04:00

I am so sick of unpacking. I mean, how many books can one family have? So I am procrastinating with an entry.

Yesterday, our neighbors invited us to the island. It's this unassuming island in the Potomac, just north? of Georgetown (up the tow-path of the C&O canal) that I guess is just about impossible to get a memebership to. We didn't know what to expect, but we piled the kids in the car and drove over. To get to the island you have to walked down a rugged, stony path (which I must say was a bit complicated with Maxy on my back and a backpack on my front), then at the water's edge you ring a bell. The ferryman runs down from the clubhouse and jumps onto a dock which he proceeds to tug across the river via a cord that runs about shoulder high. It was strange reminded me on the river Styx. The island was wooded and cool. We immediately suited up and jumped into the river from the swimming dock. Jackson has become a fish. He was wearing a life jacket, but this is the first time he's ever swam on his own. Our neighbors have an older taught, Kate (she's five), so Jack was happy to follow her all around the island. Maxy even got in the water, snuggled up tight in a little tiny life jacket. It was pretty cute. It was a good day. The kind where you feel exhausted from the sun and the swimming.

2006-08-04T15:03:00.000-04:00

Well, I did it. I finished a chapbook manuscript. This is my second chapbook manuscript. Now, I just have to get the guts up to send it out. It's called The Flying Trolley and it's all based on creative writing students I've taught mostly in public hospitals and prisons. I might have gotten a little cheeseball on the opening essay, but...What can you do. I wrote five poems this week. I thin that's a post-children record for me. My other, book manuscript is now a whopping 71 pages, but it really needs some cutting back now. The problem is, I keep adding to it when I just need to let go of parts of it. It's hard to make new poems and keep the old if you know what I mean. But it's damn good to be back in the writing saddle.

2006-08-01T15:31:00.000-04:00

Today was divine. The air embraced it was so hot. Mexican food on a date in the city (fresh guacamole that was perfectly salted) and a new poet! Can you believe it? I was reading on the Metro and found her. Lorine Niedecker. I’d never read her before now. But her mythical miniatures eddied into my eyes today (via an article by Majorie Perloff). What a luxury to find a miniaturist that carefully constructs as Emily did, and adapts and rejuvenates myth and personal lyric like H.D.. She identified with the Objectivists (like Zukofsky who was her mentor) but her brilliance is how the personal lyric (“weedy speech”) jig-jags out of the lapping lull of her exact and dual-minded words. Here is one of her poems (Jean Valentine must just adore her! I can hear Jean’s lyrical construction in Niedecker.)

I married
in the world’s black night
for warmth
If not repose.
At the close—
someone.

I hid with him
from the long range guns.
We lay leg
In the cupboard, head
In closet.

A slit of light
at no bird dawn—
Untaught
I thought
he drank

too much.
I say
I married
And lived unburied.
I thought—

2006-07-31T12:30:00.000-04:00

I forgot to mention the sound of trains -- you hear them all the time in my neighborhood. I live within spitting distance from the Metro, but it's not just Metro trains that travel those tracks. The night is filled with the iron and steel weight of passage North. I know in a few months, I will no longer hear the sound of the trains, [because you never hear repetitive noises after while] but for now, they remain present.

This morning I drove down to my old school - the George Washington University to meet with an old Professor and to scour the library for books on H.D. It was wonderful. The library is STOCKED by the way. I found everything I was looking for without having lean on consortium. It was also wonderful to reconnect with one of the professors who really encouraged me to become a poet. He caught me up on all of the gossip and gave me a few contacts to pursue in regards to publication, teaching etc. The meeting eased my mind a little. I've been feeling as if I'm about to go back underwater for a long time -- taking on a new job -- and have been afraid I will be in a place where I will no longer have time to write or work on my dissertation. It's a necessary submerging - we need the money. But, meeting with him, somehow, made me feel better about it all. Just talking about poetry and poetics and to people who care about poetry and poetics makes me feel better.

There goes another train -- it's slow moving and feels emense.

From H.D.:

When I am a cup
lifted up,
can you hear
echo in a seashell?

2006-07-29T21:32:00.000-04:00

When we came home tonight the neighborhood was filled with the music of Bamba. Our street is a fast one that intersects a real hippy neighborbood with a real urban D.C. neighborhood. There are African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Germans and a muscian from New Orleans (he plays the tuba and makes a living at it! It's fascinating) all living within my tiny block.

I talked to the school I'll be teaching at yesterday and I think I had a panic attack thinking about the full-time commitment -- how will I write? When will I ever complete my exams? I guess the same way I've done every thing else -- by the skin of my teeth. I finally wrote my first question, but I haven't yet gotten a response back from my committee chair, so who knows what she thinks.

2006-07-27T16:23:00.000-04:00

Wow - moving is, let's just say, disruptive! I've spent the last month unpacking and unpacking. So much time. However, it's amazing what you unearth when you unpack. I found 21 poems I wrote back when I lived in Brooklyn about the bog people. (Don't ask - I think I was reading a lot of Seamus Heaney) and all of these other poems I'd written in graduate school that I hadn't remebered that I had written. I saw finding them as a sign. I need to get my poems in order and my book out. I've been procrastinating long enough. So, that is now my new summer project and probably a lot of what I will be talking about in my blog.

I no longer live in Cleveland, Ohio, anymore. Now, I live in Washington D.C. I think I am still adjusting to my surroundings. We take family outings to the national mall. It's surreal. I am meeting with my old poetry professor at GW on Monday to talk about possible adjunct positions in the Spring or summer (as if I don't already have enough going on!). Then, I'm heading into GW's library to try and kick-start myself back into the Ph.D. study for your exams until your eyes bleed mode. Can't wait.

2006-03-24T11:54:00.001-05:00

This the poem I am writing on today in my exams. Amy Lowell's "The Letter":

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your sily quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

2006-03-20T21:20:00.000-05:00

Sorry it has been a long time since I last blogged. But I am in the middle of taking my Ph.D. exams and my brain is awhir (or awash) with dead poets. Today I read the first volume of Gilbert and Gubars No Man's Land. Wow. I think every female writer should read this book. I think it should be a requirement. It was like looking at my own history in the mirror. Don't get me wrong, I hardly think I'll be anthogized when I'm gone. But I'm a writer, no doubt. And though I've read the poems before, of female poets talking back to other female poets. Of women writers speaking back to their foremothers (that Elizabeth Bishop poem is my favorite)
"An Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore" where she invites Miss Moore to "please come flying" across that net of the Brooklyn Bridge. I thought about her words and the image of that awkward three-cornered hat woman with exceedingly long, gerund crammed sentences, each time I walked across that wooden-planked bridge. I'd never realized that all of my talking back to Emily and Elizabeth and Gertrude was par for the course.

And all the poems I've written back at the dead forefathers. I screamed poems at Eliot and Pound from inbetween their own words. Now, as I'm trying to intellectualize my argument about their poetics, my words are looking back at me. According to Gilbert and Gubar, my words written in the margins of Pound's Personae is a natural reaction. I can't wait to open up my old text of Frost, and Stevens. Who knows what's written in there : )

Is it unhealthy as a poet to meta-interpret oneself?

Here is that poem from Elizabeth Bishop.

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.
Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.

Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
T he flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoetrailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.

Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.

For whom the grim museums will behave like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.

We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.

With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.

2006-02-20T16:50:00.000-05:00

I went to see the film Capote last Friday night. It was a haunting film. The whole next day I kept blurring in my mind between Truman Capote the real writer (not that I knew him personally or anything!) and the actor playing him in the film (who did an amazing job.)

It made me miss being a writer in new york. That city is a place of constant stimulus (no offense Cleveland). It also made me miss gin and tonics (until of course the end of the movie where the afternotes imply that he died from complications of alcholism). The main premise of the movie is that Capote was never able to deal with the fact that he essentialy used a horrific event, and the people involved in it, to write a great story. And something about that got under my skin.

I think as a poet, you always fear how much autobiography someone might read into your work. I know I rarely let my mother read my poetry for this very reason -- she'll read my poems vorasiously as if they were my diary. And my poems are anything but biographical. There are pieces of truth in there. But useally, those pieces are so mosiaced between what real and what's not, the real story would be tough to boil out of it.

2006-02-12T15:21:00.000-05:00

I just sent out 8 submissions. It was a bit of a frenzy. I'm procrastinating working on my questions for my comprehensive exam. I try to send out every time I get rejected and I got two rejection letters this week. I wonder if anyone ever feels good about submitting? My poems look so different to me when I am reading them over an trying to decide (usually on a whim) which poems fit the journal or contest I am applying to. They just don't ever seem as shiny and bright as I thought they looked when I finished them! Perhaps others have a method to their madness of submission?

2006-02-06T21:34:00.000-05:00

Oh a silent house! Finally. The kids are in bed. I am finally by myself at my writing desk. These momments always make think about that William Carlos Williams poem "Danse Russe":

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disk
in silken mists
above shining trees, --
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely.
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,--

who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

I have finally finished a poem again! And had my reading list approved. Now if I could only get my son potty trained...

2006-01-27T11:23:00.000-05:00

William Carlos Williams
"To Elsie"

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

2006-01-27T11:16:00.000-05:00

There was one point last week where the craziness of my situation really hit home. I was holding my baby (who is sick with bronchitis), reading Plato (or should I say attempting to read Plato!) while Barney blared in the background with my older son marching back and forth singing the barney song.

Reading for exams with small children is crazy. In between all these serious texts I've been reading a memoir called The Color of Water. It's really beautifully written. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for memoir. (Ever since I read Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family. It's always so poetic.

2006-01-20T16:04:00.000-05:00

I had the great opportunity to see the critic John Carey speak at the city club of Cleveland today. He's a really approachable academic. He's brilliant, but he doesn't flaunt his knowledge in an elite way. It was an excellent lecture on the topic (he addresses in his new book) of What is art. He said some interesting things about literature and why, to him, it is the ultimate artform. He claimed that in the act of reading the reader essentially becomes an author in the way he or she participates with his or her imagination while interpreting the words. It's an interesting comment. (One that Wolfgang Iser and Martha Woodmansee no doubt have also spoken about in their writing about reader response theory and authorship respectively). But it is something that as a writer, you think about. You aren't always driving the car. You put the words on the page but you can't guess at the way they will be perceived. It's the reason why reading your work aloud to an audience is so important in the writing process because you just can't predict how your words will be responded to. You can't anticipate the authorship of the reader.

2006-01-11T17:41:00.000-05:00

I've found a great daycare for my son. It's in a good neighborhood and it just happens to be across the street from my favorite bakery, so I don't see myself losing the baby weight anytime soon. I see a lot of croissants soothing my Mama-guilt in the future. Max isn't too excited about eating from a bottle. But, the people at the center assure me the eventually he'll do it. It seems like he's teething too -- poor guy. Luckily, he won't remember any of this later.

2006-01-05T20:00:00.000-05:00

I've been looking at daycare centers for Max lately and this search has led to the expected tidal wave of emotion. It's easy to look from the surface of it and see the reason and logic of leaving your baby for a few hours a day with a care provider. I need to work. I need to study for exams. But that surge of guilt and responsibility to be home with him is strong and it has quite an undertow. I looked at a great place today that's affordable but it's in a sketchy neighborhood. So, we'll see.

I've moved on from reading Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. This week though I've been reading Sappho again. In fact yesterday I read everything by her in a sort of binge reading (it's not much to brag about since not that much of her work survives and what does is mostly in fragments). Today, I've been reading Burnett's commentary on her poems. It is interesting that so many modern women writers either referred to Sappho in their poems (Emily Dickinson), or wrote letters to her (Amy Lowell) or responded to her fragments because the Sappho's poems were written as part of a type of creative writing class or as part of a finishing school for girls where writing good lyrical poetry was of the highest priority. Maybe it's not just that Sappho was one of the few female poets in the classical cannon, maybe modern female poets were responding to an almost pedagogical tone in her verse?

2005-12-27T07:14:00.000-05:00

If Broadcloth Hearts are firmer--
Than those of Organdy--

Who is to blame? The Weaver?
Ah, the bewildering thread!
The Tapestries of Paradise
So notelessly -- are made.

--Emily Dickinson (from #278)

2005-12-21T09:12:00.000-05:00

I just made the most interesting discovery while I was studying for exams yesterday! Emily Dickinson's sister's name was Lavinia. What a strange coincidence! Emily and her strange isolated writing, and her binding of her poems, and Shakespeare's Lavinia (from Titus Andronicus) based on the tragic Philomela (who after being raped and having her tongue cut out by her sister's suitor wove her story into a tapestry) who also had a sister Procne. Philomela was transformed into a nightingale at end of the tale and that's partly why the nightingale came to represent the inspired poet in the middle ages and renaissance. What a cool coincidence. There is just something about the figure of Philomela/Lavinia that haunts me. It's a horrific story. But that motif, of a woman who losses her voice, and (in Lavinia's case her hands as well) is symbolic of the woman writer. The brother's Grimm also told a story of the miller's daughter who losses her hands and is no longer able to communicate.

2005-12-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

I just found the most amazing used bookstore. It's cavernous and its poetry section is solid. There was an entire shelf of Ezra Pound! It was like bookshopping in Berkeley again. There is nothing like the high you feel when you find a new, perfect bookstore. You don't even have to buy anything. You just have to go and absorb all those texts surrounding you.

2005-12-18T21:47:00.000-05:00

I actually said to my husband today that I understand why Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not suicidal. I was joking. But, to be a writer and a mother of two young children that won't take naps and won't listen is enough to tug and pull at the most iron of nerves. That quiet desperation that every mother feels when the kids are crying and the laundry needs be done and the clutter of the house is pushing in on her is real and often unsaid (or unheard).

2005-12-15T15:16:00.000-05:00

Snow, snow, and more snow. I haven't worked on a poem in two weeks. But I did have my Dad do some research for me. I was looking for the name of this old haunted house in the town of Bodega (it's the town where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the film, The Birds and also the town where I was married -- the church was actually in the movie). I've been waiting for him to send me the name of the building and I guess I've been using that as a reason not to sait down and finish the poem. Now that I've got it, I'll have to get back to work. It's called the Duran House. When I was growing up (in the outskirts of Bodega) a story was being passed around about a ghost who frequented the Duran House. A girl, with a blue glow. WHo'd just sit at the top of the steps and look down. She may finally make an appearance in one of my poems. We'll see if she fits.

2005-12-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

Writing as Sappho wasn't as successful as I would have liked. It was hard not sound forced. She is one of my favorite poets, so maybe that's what's holding me back? By getting frustrated about sappho's voice, I did, however, think of a new angle for my piece on Donne's wife. I'm going to write two scenes - one from the perspective of when she is living and the other literally spoken from her grave. We'll see how it goes.

We 've gotten a lot of snow here today. I broke down and bought boots for the first time. I had to buy them for my son. So, I tried on a pair for myself and I must say, they are nice! I like having dry feet in the winter! Does this mean I am finally embracing the Cleveland winter? I'm also craving one of those foot-length puffy jackets. It would be like walking around in a comforter.

2005-11-28T10:58:00.000-05:00

Well last week I was worried about writing in the voice of Anne More Donne (which actually turned out OK. I wrote 724 words, which is a lot for a poet!). Today, I've got to write in the voice of either Sappho or the Muse. Or, I guess I could take a whole new spin on Anne. gulp. I'm surprised at how much fun this prose writing is! Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm up for a novel or anything quite yet, but this dabbling is fun.

2005-11-27T15:59:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving. I survived a 10 hour drive to Richmond, VA. with my 3 month old, my 2 and 1/2 year old and mother-in-law. I'm surprised at how smoothly the drive went. Long drives (when the children are sleeping) are refuges for the mind. At home these types of rare moments (both children sleeping at the same time) are polluted by my duties to housework and laundry and cooking. But, on the Pennsylvania turnpike, my husband driving, I can sit back and let the images of a poem gather like little duststorms in my mind.

While we were driving, I saw a little kid stuck in the way-back of a hatchback. He looked lonely and tired. That used to be my seat when I was little. My mother loves to tell a story about how I was miraculously saved as a child. We were driving to my cousin's graduation from high school in a blue hatchback and I was all nestled in the way-back, but I got lonely and crawled up through the seats to the front passenger side where my mom was sitting to sit on her lap. Just then a man rear-ended us and my little seat, the hatch, was crumpled up like an accordion. You would have been killed! My mother would always say. She kept a Polaroid of the crumpled car in an album and each time we'd look through, she tell me the story again. She'd ask what made you decide to crawl up to the front? and I'd want to tell her something miraculous. That I'd heard voices like Joan of Arc, or I'd seen a vision. But, I'd just smile and say the truth.

2005-11-21T09:40:00.000-05:00

Today I have to write from the voice of Anne More Donne. It's an assignment for class. We are writing a play (or a series of dramatic monologues that are intertwined) and you'd think as a creative writer I'd be excited about it. But it's just daunting. There is no record of anything every having been written by Anne and so everything about her has to be compilled and filled in from what is said (and what is not said) in her famous husband's letters, sermons and poems. What's more, he never mentions her name in any of these texts (the only text which can truely be attributed to having been written about her is her epitaph). Plus, it's not poetry! So, I am procrastinating by blogging. I am not only writing the voice of Anne, but I'll be taking on the voices of Sappho and the Muses as well. No small feat. Wish me luck.

2005-11-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

"Islands" Muriel Rukeyser

O for God's sake
they are connected underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are sperate like them

2005-11-18T10:02:00.000-05:00

The first snow is always a novelty. The chill. Finding your winter coat. Having an excuse for tea and cookies in the afternoon. New snow makes me think of a clean slate. A new, crisp, white page to start the year over again on. Fall just feels like it is waiting for something to happen. The impending leaves, their darkening. The whole landscape is waiting to be covered in snow and you can feel that anticipation in the air. My mother-in-law needs this snow. Perhaps it'll begin to whiten the dark grief she's been shrouded in. Someone was reminding me how it used to be when someone died that you bought a dark suit or dress when your spouse died and you wore it every day for a year. Literally, every day. She said by the end of it you were so sick of the clothes, you threw them away, and with them you threw away your grief. What a metaphor. The physicallity of it.

2005-11-08T10:02:00.000-05:00

I'm having a hard time getting a poem together that I've had brewing in my mind for a few weeks. I think about it everything I drive to my in-laws house. There's this lake we pass over -- Lake Meander. It's a recovery with a town underneath. Literally, underneath the water. Like a steeltown Atlantis or something. The town was deserted and then submerged. In my mind I like to think you can look down and see tables set for dinner and tattered curtains blossoming from the windows -- but probably not a Pompeii. The lake is freckled with all of these cement pilings that are covered with cormorants. It's a full-deck kind of image that just sits on your sub-conscious (like those sea-birds!). I started relating it to John Donne's metaphors about shadows: "As all shadows are of one color, if you respect the body from which they were cast (for our shadows upon clay will be dirty and in a garden green and flowery)." Then, yesterday my mother-in-law told me she and her husband (who just passed away two months ago) used to talk about the cormorants every time they passed over Meander to come to our house. So, when she was driving over yesterday she asked him to take the form of a cormorant and to lift off up from one of the pilings to prove to her he was listening. She said one of them did alight.
Now I just need to sit down, shuffle the deck, and write.

2005-11-04T16:34:00.000-05:00

Today, after a hard day of Ph.D. work, I strapped Max into the baby Bjoern and walked to the local stripmall. It was a perfect fall day. It was even warm. I kept thinking about what Kurt Vunnegut had said at a reading I saw him at a few years ago (actually, it was on the day I turned 30, so I remember the day vividly). He was talking about the "writers process" and how stepping out into the world say, to the post office or the Office max, and mingling with the rest of the world is just as important as sitting down to write. Anyway, thinking about what Vonnegut said made me feel quite "literary" on my errands (just as cooking sometimes makes me feel the same after having washed lettuce with Galaway Kinnell -- but that's another story).

2005-11-01T17:00:00.000-05:00

Another day, another poop blow-out. My son is an amazing pooper. For his size, he seems to create an amazing amount of poop. But enough about poop. I'm really just procastinating a paper I need to write (and a reading list I need to create for my exams this Spring). I realized today that the title of this blog is in the past tense - like I'd already survived it. When in reality I'm knee-deep in it.

The day is gray and worrisome because winter is already on it's haunches waiting to pounce. I'm not a big fan of snow. Especially city snow. The grey weight of it kind of overwhelms me. Winter is a good time to be a student though - you don't have a lot of distractions (I already have enough of those.)

2005-10-31T15:38:00.000-05:00

The grand permission - the second adolescence of becoming a mother. Let's just say the last two and a half years of my life have been a transition. Being a writer and a mother is amazing and daunting at the same time. Being a writer, a mother and pursueing a Ph.D. at the sametime is insane and it is here that I will be venting that stress/anxiety/etc. (I say this as my littlest one is wailing in my arms) Ahh...the quiet writers life.

When I was twenty-four I went up to Vermont to a writers retreat to finish up my thesis. I was living in New York at the time and just that transition from city noise, to the deafening quiet of solitude was intense. But the cabin I lived in for one week was one of seven on a wooded hill. Every day, madened by my solitude, I'd venture out and meet a new woman in her own seperate cabin. Each had a story.

The first, was in her forties, with hennaed hair. She was sitting by a blazing fire when I walked in and the air was soft with frech love songs. When I asked why she was there she said she just need a break from her kids and her husband. I couldn't understand it at the time. (I had nothing but time to myself to write -- in fact my life was swollen with it) But now, as I sit here years later trying to write in between nursing and groceries and cleaning and laundry and did I brush my teeth today? I get it.