Hello, Dennis

It started raining several hours ago & is supposed to rain for the rest of the week. Thanks, Hurricane Dennis!

I still feel a bit cut loose from routine, even though I've been back home for over a week. I'm trying to take this as an opportunity to reshape said routine. I would like to spend every evening from 7 to 10 in my study, reading and writing. Tonight I went in there about 7:20 and emerged about 9:40, although I did take a couple of breaks. Not too bad. Finished reading Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Interesting stuff, and gave me some ideas for working with longer forms.

This summer sometime I want to tackle a major revision of my longish poem "Interstellar Static" (which a few of you have seen). We talked about it in Provincetown and the suggestion that most made the hair rise up on the back of my neck was to write it in a much more fragmented form. I might write fragments from different time periods, or write formally different pieces, or even use different voices entirely. I might make it a bit of a mosaic. Maybe it will be something you have to stand a little distance from in order to see the clear picture.

The thrum at the seabed of my feelings today alternates between excitement and fear. I woke this morning with a sinus headache (again: thanks, Dennis!) and wicked cramps and a rather deep-seated sense of dread, so I stayed home from work. It's easy for me to say "yes, I'm thinking about doing a low-residency MFA and the thought of trying to tackle a two-year program that costs about what I make in one year, when I have no savings and am driving a 14-year-old car that will need to be replaced soon, is scary as heck and makes me want to throw up" but. When I say that I'm excited and scared about what comes next, I think I really mean the poetry.

There is the joy of falling in love with something at the very moment you also realize it is going to be taken away from you. And no I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that.

Although on Friday of the workshop, sitting in the Adams Pharmacy drinking a bottled Frappuccino and watching it rain, watching a dog walk by with his stuffed toy held in his mouth like an Oscar statuette, the sense of "I don't want this to ever, ever end" was almost overwhelming.

It was a fabulous workshop but over and above that there was the fact that I came there needing to be in that space. I knew what I needed to feel and I went to a place where it was possible to feel that.

Walking down Pearl Street in the newly minted dark, after the student reading, I spread my arms wide and laughed. And then I went back to my room and I wrote.

That's the happy ending of it: And then I went back to my room and I wrote.

I know what I need to feel and I need to make my own home into a place where it is possible to feel that.

Tonight's forecast says "Humid with thundery rains."