I know I shouldn't say it.

You know how everyone says you shouldn't complain about being busy, because by doing so, you just

1. imply that everyone else could not possibly be as busy as you are, and
2. also might start a war about who is, in point of fact, busier.

(me. obviously.)

But still: I am feeling frantic. I will not elaborate. I will just say, however, that in the next week, the following shall occur, with or without me, in my personal body, doing the events that the occurrences imply:

• write a poem a day, because (a) National Poetry Month, and (b) priorities.
• bind 400 chapbooks! with students!  (are you coming to this event? you totally should!)
• meet with an unknown amount of students, because who knows if they will sign up? even if I beg them?
• put in my travel forms GOSH
• work out loads of times, because (a) working out makes me feel better, thus (b) sanity, or what passes for it
• teach a Publication Center workshop because way back when we planned the schedule it seemed like a good idea to do this the week before the chapbook launch hell YES
• take just a few more things to Print Services, and beg them to print them immediately
• catch up on all the things that I left to their own devices while I gallivanted away to Houston and then to Cedar City on academic and literary jaunts, huzzah!
• teach the Publication Studies class, whatevs
• defend America, aka all the department curriculum proposals before the General Education Committee, good LORD
• go and pick up my Costco membership that has been waiting literally for months so I can
• buy refreshments for the event
• and other administrative issues too banal, frustrating, and so forth to elaborate BUT I COULD ELABORATE, HOLY HELL I COULD

Etcetera.

Not complaining though, not one bit.

I'm just going to say, though, that I have mostly been keeping up with Poem A Day for National Poetry Month (the cruelest month). And I'm gonna brag about it here.

(one)

(two)

(three)

(four)

(five)

(six)

(seven)

(eight)

(nine)

(ten)

(eleven)

(twelve)

poem + Monday

Poem 4.

Today's stats:

10 open slots for student appointments
0 students signed up for these appointments (where ARE they?)

3 out of 4 chapbook manuscripts are ready to go to Print Services

2 excellent lectures by Omid Safi today

2 copies of flicker signed at The King's English (TKE: I couldn't find a link for people to purchase my book!) (!!!)

2 workouts

2 episodes of Bosch

1 pair of blue sandals purchased (and also 1 blue sweater. So: 2 blue things purchased.)

Time for bed? time for bed.

Notable events.

poem.

Update:

spring snow, am I right?

ut pictura poesis.

mesopotamian pottery incantation bowl,
circa 7th c.

prayer/spell

the words spin round the bowl, a spiral curse:

an incantation written for one house,

a text to save the house from idol, wrack,

a demon’s evil eye:    upon a plinth

it rests, the people it was meant to save

from harm now dust themselves, but it achieves

a silent chime, the same I hear from far 

away, inscribed in Farsi on canvas

brushed in black ink:  gesture involuted,

echoic, nested close enough that each

repeated Sufi verse becomes a patch,

a bit of fabric stitching up a text

or map:    a world made out of words, except

this spell is called a prayer:  o flimsy script

o dry inkstone   o unfamiliar

o my brush   let inchoate letters make 

of letters, stem and curve and dot, a plea

an orison:   exceeds the edge and fades

into the wall, the paint, whitens to light:

siah armajani, 'prayer' (1962)
at the Walker Art Center

Ten AWP Questions.

1. Why, pray tell, is my editor not here in Minneapolis, at the great Mecca of writing?
2. Why have I not slept for two days in a row? At least, not much?
3. Why did I just set myself the project of writing a poem composed of rhyming couplets, and including a little dog?
4. How many panels will I attend tomorrow?
5. And will I get up in time for a nine o'clock?
6. Tomorrow, shall I dress for comfort, or for speed, or both?
7. At what point will the book fair overwhelm me tomorrow--after 45 minutes, or 30, or 10?
8. Will it be worth it to attend a reading tomorrow that starts at 8:30?
9. What if the readers are Vijay Seshadri and Arthur Sze?
10. And will it have been worth it after all?

Backing up.

Last week sometime, my friend had a hard drive scare. There was a shutdown, and then a sad, question mark-y icon. "You are out of luck," said the tech guys.

I thought to myself: shit! Because backing up is not my strong suit. This, despite the zillions of sleek little terabyte hard drives I have laying around casually, all hey, girl, how bout I back you up? And I'm all, nah, I got poems to write. It's National Poetry Month, yo.

Well, those carefree days are no more. I am backing up to a cloud thingie recommended by my son. You set it up and the system backs all your data up to the celestial data cloud.

Children, let me tell you: a lot of data takes a lot of days to back up. To the cloud. And by a lot, I mean my computer is running slow.

Safari is all um, I just ate a lot of carbs so I'm taking a nap right now. Open up an app? So tired. Don't rush me. Try to upload/download anything? Whoa, that seems like so   much    work    why don't you go take a break or something? I need to think about it.

Also, the number of files it says it's backing up--this back up system--keeps changing, and not always in the downward direction. This makes me anxious. Is the system just finding more files to back up? Is it because I keep using my computer--obviously, these are modern times!--and therefore my work needs backing up? I tell you, I feel like this back up might last forever. Like No Exit.  Or Kafka. Or, you know, a hellish afterlife. Except I'm still living this life, and I need to get some work done!

Literally since I started this post, my back up system has discovered that it has a few hundred extra files to back up.

My friend was lucky, in that the tech guys were able to find her data, almost all of it. All her FB friends were all, you better start backing it up or next time the disaster will be for REAL. That's when I started backing up, and I think I will be backing up forever from here to eternity.

Data, amirite?

Today's poem.

Things we didn't do.

Yesterday, I did not buy this book:

Denise Levertov, from
Oblique Prayers

nor this:

Franz Wright,
God's Silence

--not this either:

Ted Hughes,
Birthday Letters

I didn't really seriously even consider this, because I think I already have it.

Federico Garcia Lorca,
Poet in New York

I am now regretting all of them.

We went downtown because the historian and his co-author were going to speak at a series of events arranged to celebrate May Day, organized (loosely) by two Socialist groups. Somehow the wires got crossed (I am particularly proud of my mot for this occasion: "For Socialists, they're not as organized as you might think." BAM.), and we did not, in the end, find ourselves at the location of the actual events. So we had lunch with our friend, the co-author, and then, because our movie was not starting for a couple of hours, we stopped into Ken Sanders'. That's where I picked up each of the above books and read in them for a little while. I should have bought them. They are all right up my alley, even the Lorca that I think I have, may or may not have.

I hate refusing things that present themselves. I hate saying no. Most of all I hate recalcitrance in myself. What am I saving myself for? What, exactly?

What we did do was come home and read this and that. We watched a thing or two and ate some food that happened to be lying around. We walked the dog and admired the beautiful cool weather.  We both slept a little in various nooks around the house. I made cookie dough and let it cure. It was quiet. Quiet seems to be the thing I need to say yes to right now.

Couplet. This may actually be the last one. The very last one.

We decided we couldn't be bothered to see a movie.

On our way home from downtown:

Me: ...and maybe I'll hang up my clothes, and then I will make these cookies--they're supposed to be, like, the best chocolate chip cookies in the history of cookies.

The historian:  Why's that?

Me: Well, they have some special ingredients. Like cake flour and bread flour.

Historian: Is there butter?

Me: Yes. And really good chocolate.

Historian: Lots and lots of butter?

Me: They are, in fact, an all butter cookie. But the real secret, apparently, is to let the dough rest a long time. Because--

Historian: (interrupting) --because if they don't get, like, twenty-three hours of rest, they're just no good the whole next day.

(this is the last couplet, but it is not the very last couplet.)

Interrogatory.

For my poetry class, a student and I spent some time today, looking for cover images for our class chapbook. As a title, the students nominated Unanswered Questions (or, technically, Questions Unanswered) to signify their interaction with my pedagogy. Which I am choosing to find hilarious.

Here are some images we found (creative commons > flickr > "question mark graffiti"):

by Brandon Giesbrecht

by Bilal Kamoon

by quinn.anya

by Trois Tetes

by shaggy359

...and here's a couplet. No, here are two.

Dear last week of teaching,

You seem, like, maybe two weeks overdue?  I'd say "not that I'm complaining," except, honestly, I am complaining. The semester is long. The academic year is long. If I felt like a better teacher, I would feel like wishing I had just a little longer with the students--but I don't feel like a better teacher, and I don't feel that way.

Except for you, dear student. You, and you and you and you. You know who you are. I'll definitely miss you, and I will always wish that I had just a little longer with you--at an infinitely slow pace of "just a little longer."

But as for the rest of it--the very last meetings; the proposed meetings for which I sent out e-mails a week, two weeks ago, that by now seem like a doom, still out there withholding their replies; the last class and the other last class; the layout/printing/binding; the students I'm still helping with their projects--could it not just be folded into one of those wrinkles in time you hear so much about nowadays? and in that tidy little pocket, everything still clinging to the next few days could just tumble? and I could walk right across that neat fold, into the week after graduation and onto an airplane that will take me to a foreign land?

Last week of teaching, I know you are pursing your lips at me and shaking your head. But just shut up. I am still in the middle of you, but I am already tired of you.

I renounce you. I renounce you. I renounce you.

With respect,

htms

part of a couplet. it's all I've got.

Monday.

Some observations:

Watching a Jazz game, which I almost never do deliberately because now, like so many pleasurable things, it stresses me out unless the conditions are just right. Triple overtime. The Mavs. The Jazz are playing with skill and joy and, it must be said, a little bit erratically, because they are the Jazz at this moment in their history. But they're up by 5 with 1:08. Jason Terry is ridiculous.

I finished a truly epic bout of Big Responding in my composition classes. In the history of responding ordeals, this is one of the most ordealiest. But I have prevailed over it. I feel the better for it.

As I drove to work this morning, I found myself listening in, as it were, on my own inner discussion with myself. I found that I was happy.

Soon I will be talking to students only about small scale revisions. And poetry. Soon I will be accepting the final version of their work. Soon I will be finishing this and moving on to that.

There is a full-on riot of tulips in my front yard.

I have loved writing the couplets for this month's gesture at poetry every day. It has felt increasingly like a meditation.

And the Jazz--on this beautiful Monday, the Jazz win it.

The Megastore recommends.

1. a rainy spring day. Okay, it would have been better if I had had a hat or a coat with a hood when it started lightly hailing as I walked briskly, then brisklier, from my car to the movie theater. But I maintain a rainy day makes the flowers really gleam. And it's not spring, in my opinion, if there aren't rainy gray days. Spring without rain is technically "summer," and I am not ready for that, and no matter what you think, you aren't either.

magpie

maple tree

tulips

2. two movie Saturdays. Nothing quite makes a Saturday feel like a Saturday than two movies. They could be in a row, as in you don't leave the theater, or they could be two separate movie dates, as occurred today. With my daughter and my grandson, I saw Mirror, Mirror, fully of vivid colors and gorgeous images. With the historian, I saw The Kid With the Bike,  heartrending and hopeful and French/(Belgian), an excellent combination. In between, I came home and read some of Half Empty  by David Rakoff for my book group. Perfect.

3. Scott Carrier. Last night at the faculty convention, Scott Carrier came to speak movingly about, well, a lot of things, but centering around and circling back to a story about becoming a teacher and shepherding one young Afghan man through a college education. So great. Middlebrow and another colleague recommended him, and it worked out splendidly. In an e-mail this morning, though, Middlebrow said that he probably wouldn't go to next year's convention because the committee would no doubt "over-correct with some self-help speaker." The gods forfend!



4. students who make things like this: (and this, and this, and this, and this...)





couplet

Top 5 of everything.

At the moment, anyway--

1. Grilled cheese sandwich

2. Baby walks around saying "Oh my GAH"

3. Bruiser

4. Googling "cottage in France" and finding a bazillion, some of which we could afford

5. the memory of Ireland

Today is the day

I got caught up, or got started on the get-caught-up project.

Today is the day I received lavender shoes in the mail.

Today is the day I made sloppy joe (I don't think it needs a plural, do you?) for homeless guys. (join this project--it's a good one!).

Today's the day I realized yet again that I find watching the Jazz play in high stakes games almost unbearable. Never mind that a Chauncey Billups/D Will matchup is kind of awesomely watchable. If only I could stand to watch.

Today is the day I was home, quiet, working, with Bruiser--presentiment of summer.

Today, two poems, neither of them much to speak of. Today, no (visible) snakes.

Serpentless day.

All observers who were horrified by the previous snakes can, as of today, settle down. We had a day with no snake sightings. Moreover, I found out all sorts of things about the historian's snake shenanigans. Apparently, the historian, whom I believe to be one of the world's most secular men, is a snake-handler. If by "snake-handler," we mean "a man who will shoo snakes back to a safer place so they won't run into the road and get run over by a car."

The way I see it, you can find this admirable, in the way that we admire the great humanitarians, because he's looking out for the creatures of the world.

On the other hand, they're snakes. Here's a bit of the colloquy between my son who is in China and myself this morning:

Walker: has that snake been crucified yet?

me: it was a bunch of garden snakes.

I think there were like six of them.

Walker: six?

8:18 AM me: seriously

Walker: what did you do with them?

me: I have another picture of them dispersiing

Walker: it looked like one

me: they ran away

under a rock

Walker: ahhh!

me: I know it was creepy

they were all in a pile

Walker: call the exterminator

Walker: they were probably mating

me: gaaaa

Walker: i know, we need them out

before there are millions

8:19 AM me: they eat spiders

and mice

Walker: i really am freaked out, i don't ever want to see that picture again

i don't care they might eat me

me: okay, okay

but you know John

Walker: kill!kill!

me: he shooed them away because he was afraid they might go into the street and get hurt

Walker: no!

me: I kid you not.

8:20 AM Walker: what if they crawl into my room through the window well?

me: I will point this out.

Walker: at least shoo them into the horse place

that's probably where they all come from

me: it was in the front yard

john says he might try to "relocate" them and I will encourage the field to be the relocation place

Walker: those snakes will be the death of me

me: do you remember when you trapped one under a flower pot?

Walker: maybe

me: I do.

I wrote a poem about it.

Walker: did we kill it, because we should have

what did we do with it?

me: no, we released it into the wild

I wouldn't let you kill it

Walker: he is probably the root of this mess

Let me add to this bit of trans-continental discourse that the historian's snake relocation methods include putting the snake into a paper bag. Does this involve picking up the snake with his hands? Yes, yes it does. It goes without saying that the hands are bare, as in, without protective snake-proof gloves with tongs attached.

"Wow, I guess everyone's freaked out by the snakes," he says, mildly, after singing son calls to ask about the snakes.

Sir, the reason we are freaked out is that they are snakes. Do I have to spell it for you? S-N-A-K-E-S. Which word, by the way, comes from the way way back Proto-Indo-European root for "super-f***ing-uncanny limbless elongate." I looked it up.

Today's poem, perhaps uncoincidentally titled "To a snake."

tags: serpentless

To do.

Things I need, really really need, to do:

• plant 10,000 poppies
• plant a hedge of red roses, like Sleeping Beauty
• prune my roses
• paint my bedroom
• strip the bedroom wallpaper so I can paint my bedroom
• air everything out
• clean like mad
• think for hours without talking to anyone
• write no more letters forever
• wake up when I wake up
• be outside
• give grave and deeply considered thoughts to things like dinner
• purchase the food of spring, with many many vegetables
• put all my sweaters away
• put all my tights away

Today's poem. Who knows how many poems there will be by the actual end of April.

Thirteen ways of looking at April 13.

1. Pancakes for breakfast.

2. I got to wear my yellow coat.

3. New poem.

4. However, odd poem.

5. Walk with Bruiser in the cold.

6. Escaped from challenging meeting dignity etc. intact.

7. Saw Dr. Write at her signing. Huzzah!

8. Rose to the challenge of making dinner after long day.

9. Inspiring homemade mac and cheese--perhaps the best ever made by anyone, ever? Perhaps.

10. Cute shoes.

11. The historian greeted me when I got home.

12. I shall arise early to greet the dawn and also the Board of Trustees on the morrow.

13. In the meanwhile, I shall sleep. Huzzah!

A small discourse on the word "work."

It has instructive contrasts with play.

It reasserts itself come Monday.

It is good to have. But that doesn't mean that it always feels good. To have.

It reminds one that previously, there were restaurants and socializing and bookfairs and out-of-town. And Sunday.

It is synonymous with "employment."

It may be a kind of alienation. Or it may be a kind of fulfillment, or at least some people think so.

Fine. One is grateful for it. Fine. Grateful.

Fine.

Luckily, there is poetry to save us.

High concept poem.

Tomorrow, I leave for AWP in Denver, and the people, I am kind of excited, because I have outfits to wear, and music to listen to on the trip, and work to do--wait, am I excited about that? damn.--and people to see and stuff to learn and awesome dinners out to have. Etcetera.

Point 2: there has been enough going on here and there, hither and yon, that I (a) did not write a poem yesterday, and (b) only barely got one for today. Yesterday, at the end of a lo[insert extra 'o's here]ong day, we happened to find ourselves at the Dianne Reeves show, which is not a bad place to be, but (1) there was a winter storm happening on the way into the show, which we--I think I can speak for all of us here--had on our minds as being probably likely to continue for the return portion of the journey, and (2) the day had been lo[insert extra 'o's here]ng, and (3) what about National Poetry Month? So whilst contemplating Dianne Reeves's lovely ensemble and accessories while she was singing with great splendor, I thought I would write a poem about adornment and I scribbled notes galore in the dark without my glasses on, notes which I transcribed a little while ago.

However: those notes did not feel like becoming a poem tonight.

So instead, I wrote this. [< - that "this" is a link.]

I will be having my laptop with me--that is to say, my laptop will be companionably accompanying me, as in, my laptop insisted on coming with to Denver. So perhaps there will be further updates, poetry-wise, or maybe I will just do a little online teaching. Check back here to find out!

It's Easter, here's a poem.

Seriously, that's pretty much what I've got.