Live to tell.

I've been saying for the last several weeks or maybe for the last several decades that I can't think about the thing that's happening in, like two weeks, because I can only think about the three things that are in my face (when I say this, I like to hold my own hand one inch in front of my face, with my fingers spread out like an immoveable wall) right now, and when those three things are out of my face, then the next three things can take their place. It's sort of shocking to me (a) how much I like retelling this little demonstration of my state of mind/life, complete with hand gesture, and (b) how entirely apt it is.

So the three things that are in my face right now:

(a) grading
(b) contracts for visiting writers next year, and all that that implies (and believe me: it implies a lot)
(c) there are actually several things vying for the (c) spot on my list of three things (hand in front of my own face) currently in my face right now, I can't quite decide which one is in-my-face-iest. Which may be a little problem, come to think of it.

Well, the good thing is that teaching is finished for the semester and the academic year. I do have a few students who don't quite seem to realize this, which is probably my own damn fault because I have let a few of them have a little bit of extra time, which one or two of them seem to think means I am still teaching the class. Which I am not. I am not teaching anymore, even if I'm letting people turn things in one, two, three days late. Still: teaching, as an activity that involves me actively instructing people, is over. OVER, students.

And the other good thing is: today I could actually feel myself unwind. I read the paper without the strong feeling that I needed to be done with it already so I could move on to tasks. No. Today my tasks included:

• talk to my daughter in Scotland
• go down to Orem with my daughter and grandkids to visit my folks
• buy excellent cheese at Trader Joe's and also ranunculus and stocks and sweet William, which are currently making my house smell beautiful
• plant a heliotrope
• take Bruiser for two walks with the historian
• watch the penultimate episode of The Good Wife, which, no matter how it has let me down, and in fairly significant ways, I am still finding riveting

So that's my Sunday. If you were keeping track, I wrote 26 poems for National Poetry Month (some of which I did not post, but I did write them). Perhaps I will write four more poems, belatedly, in much the same spirit as my students, who are still turning in late activities and assignments and heaven knows what all. But at least I will not email and ask you to teach me how to write them.

In conclusion:

Still here, albeit in poetic form.

I'm just writing poems, that's all. Or 'poems,' in some cases. That's why there have been no blog posts, in case you have been standing around wondering.

Anyway, I've posted almost all of the poems here.  As per usual, it's a mixed bag:

(last night in the dark:) 

Me: I can't wait for this week to be over. 

The historian: I know. 

[long pause:] 

Me: At least I only have six more poems to write. 

Sigh.

But also as per usual, it's rewarding--if you write more, more ideas for writing come to you, and that's a fact, as in it walks, talks, and smells like a fact, even if I have no empirical data besides my own production to prove it.

But what I'm really here to say is that soon, very soon--on May 1, in fact--I will be writing blog posts again. I KNOW. I'm sure everyone has been waiting with bated breath for that to happen. Well, bated breath or whatevs, that is what's happening. On May 1. I am prognosticating, prophesying, and public service announcing it.

Poems, just in case you want a concise set of links:

(one)

(two)

(three)

(four)

(five)

(six)

(seven)

(eight)

(nine)

(ten)

(eleven)

(twelve)

(thirteen)

(fourteen)

(fifteen)(terrible self-pitying poem. there's always at least one.)

(sixteen)

(seventeen)

(eighteen)

(nineteen)

(twenty)(this will one day be my Prince poem. Not finished yet.)

(twenty-one)(too terrible to post--but one day it will be better. Based on some love-letters Charlotte Bronte sent to someone who did not requite her love. Tragic.)

(twenty-two)

(twenty-three)

(twenty-four)

Little-known facts.

Tonight, after the poetry reading downtown, after deciding where to eat, after our late dinner, we walked to our car in back of the brewpub. Next door, at the pub next door, the Poplar Pub, there was music on the patio, a patio which must have been covered, because it had been raining and there were evidently people outside. I heard the noise of people talking, eating, drinking, and music lifting on the wind. It was funk: Rufus, with Chaka Khan, "Tell Me Something Good."

I saw Rufus, with Chaka Khan, when I was still a teenager. It was at the Forum in Los Angeles. They were the opening act for Stevie Wonder, who was touring with what must have been Fulfillingness First Finale, since it was about the time "Tell Me Something Good" came out. Stevie Wonder wrote the song. Chaka Khan's career was launched with that band and that song.

I remember that time, when all the best music was soul and R&B and funk. I'm pretty sure I didn't appreciate that fact, since I was all Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon and Jackson Browne at the time. Respect to them, but ever since I left SoCal when I was about 18, some of the music that most powerfully conjures that time up for me is the music I so easily dismissed back then--Al Green, Marvin Gaye, the O'Jays, the Temptations, the Spinners, Bill Withers, Billy Preston. (Although I guess I didn't dismiss it entirely--I did go to the concert [with my very good old friend--are you still reading?].

I saw Chaka Khan one other time, when she was opening for Prince. That is a big old voice, with an almost electric edge. Even on a rainy night, over the fence in the back patio of another bar and through a parking lot, all the way into 2012.

This is the audio from the recording grafted on/synched sort of with a live recording. Anyway, you get the drift:



New: Spotify Play Button!

[couplet-o-rama]

Today

I shared these with the Folio staff (issue launch next week!)

these are my pretty darn good version of the recipe linked above.
by which I mean, they are almost as cute. (photo credit: jason mcfarland)

and watched this:



and read this obsessively

and wrote this.

Also: the semester is almost over. Just in case you didn't notice. How could you not notice?

Dang good day.

Even though I had plenty of stuff to do that I didn't get done today, it still felt like a good day--the kind of day when you feel light because you can see that the big mountain of things there are to get done, you'll get done one way or another. I might even get my office cleaned out, for instance, at or around the end of the semester. I will certainly make some progress tomorrow on catching up in my online course. The weather's cold but warming. Even my friends' accomplishments are cheering me up--middlebrow's upcoming dissertation defense, I realized today, makes me feel happy to contemplate, and dr. write's upcoming distinguished lecture. Good news all around. Ice cream for everyone.

Which leads me to this: I got the letter today saying that my sabbatical proposal was approved, the thought of which makes me feel elated and beyond beyond. I had agreed to meet college daughter after work for a movie and then dinner--we saw The Boleyn Girl, which I had predicted would be well-dressed lurid trash, but I unexpectedly thought was pretty good, really. (It's possible that my good mood affected my viewing.)

And then, when I got home, there was a letter from the Arts Festival, saying that I got the Mayor's Artist Award in the Literary Arts. People who like and care for me nominated me, which is part of the joy--but it also felt great to read those words, written by a stranger. In a letter, which I will now frame and turn into a little shrine. (kidding.)

Finally: in light of all the above, it felt just wonderful to write a poem, the inaugural poem from the Poem-a-Day-for-a-Month Project, 2.0, in celebration of the cruellest month--National Poetry Month. You can read it here.

Cheers!

It doesn't make more sense than this.

I finished a week of reading portfolios, writing comments, and conferring with students. It snowed yesterday, great flying flakes that melted within hours. My son is--I think--in Malaysia. Some of my family are moving house. I have too many shoes. We had Indian food tonight--pakoras and saag and kofta and naan. A couple of nights ago, I woke up out of a dream which featured both George Clooney and some strippers. In my mind the semester is already over. If not actually over, then "over." It might snow tomorrow. I am going to sleep until I wake up tomorrow. The Jazz beat the Clippers without Okur or Brewer, and with Kirilenko injured. We saw Stop-Loss tonight. I have a New York Times waiting for me to read it. My offices, both at school and at home, are barely organized chaos. I am now officially behind in my online class. Two little girls in Scotland are wearing tee shirts I bought them, one with a pink kitty and another with a striped French chicken. We are thinking of going to Ireland in the fall. Starting April 1, Dr. Write and I are going to write a poem a day for National Poetry Month. I have lettuce seeds and pea seeds that I'd better plant if I'm going to. Today is Jerry Sloan's birthday. Happy Birthday.

Totally blowing my mind.

Notes:

1. Good job, Self, on finishing the last of the preliminary portfolios.
2. Double good job on finishing student conferences.
3. It's National Poetry Month starting Sunday! Better get out the party hats. Also the confetti and banners. For people who aren't joiners, here's Charles Bernstein on a proposed "International Anti-Poetry Month." I'm sending a new version of my ms out, what I'm calling the "rage remix." Wish me luck.
4. Only four more weeks of class. Four! 4!
5. I have sooooooo much more work to do in those four weeks it is totally blowing my mind.
6. Scrubs is funny. Funnier when watching a pile of episodes on DVR with running son (the viewing time is so compressed you can basically watch 3 episodes in just over the time it takes you to watch 2). (<- that was efficiency advice, by the way--yet another bonus of reading this full-service blog) 7. It's a lot more fun to "warm up" for summer by doing a little summer stuff now than it is to finish my work. 8. For people who may have laughed at my previous post, but in private and not in the comments section where I could enjoy it, maybe this is the kind of thing you prefer. (thanks to Jennifer T., and before her, to Natasha)