Sleep, Not Poems, & More of My Morning Reading

The first snow of 2013 set me back a bit in the blog world, mostly because it set me back also in the writing-poems world. A. worked 16 hour days through the storm, and because I waited up for him to travel 40 miles back from the yard each night, I didn't stick to my morning writing schedule. It might be the pregnancy hormones overriding my innate impulse to stick-to-a-schedule-no-matter-what -- or I could just be worn out from carrying around all this extra weight -- but whatever the reason, I've been tired, tired, tired lately, and taking advantage of any chance to sleep.

Yesterday, however,  I brushed up those three monologues from November, and shipped them off to A.P., who I'll meet with (eventually) and see what he thinks. Progress on this verse play creature is being made, even if it's in tiny, tiny increments.

I managed to grade about 1/2 of the material I brought home with me this weekend. I consider this quite an accomplishment considering I was housebound with the kids for three days. Also, the mountains of laundry in my basement have been razed and reorganized (i.e. sorted and folded), but most of it has yet to find its way to a drawer on the 2nd or 3rd floors of the house.

I'm sure you're happy to know that, eh?  Fuck, I'm boring.

ANYWAY -- here are some links to subject matter that's more exciting than me!

1. It's 50 years since the death of Sylvia Plath, so of course there's been a flurry of internet writing commemorating her decision to abandon her kids and stick her head in an oven. (Is that harsh? Yes, that's harsh. Still, that's what happened, in a very black-and-white nutshell.) My mother kindly sent me this link from the BBC site, in which Jillian Becker gives a rather honest and revealing look at Plath's last days (Thanks, Mum!). And then the Academy of American Poets felt the need to post this; I'm really not sure why (although if you sneak a peak at the address, the word 'campaign' appears, so perhaps that's a hint). If you've read her journals, most of this is old-hat; if you're at all familiar with the mythology surrounding her, I'm sure none of it is surprising. But I guess what I find most disturbing about lists like "What Sylvia Plath Loved" is that it's focusing, yet again, on Plath's personality and less on her work, which was really and truly worthy of a place in The Canon. (Do we still care about The Canon? Is that even a thing anymore?)
2. My lovely, talented, I-wanna-be-like-her-when-I-grow-up undergraduate writing prof. S.F. re-posted this link on effbook. Out of them all, I've read one of these essays -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I've read other works by Woolf and Smith and Dillard and Oates and Kinkaid and Rich, but not these particular essays -- so I guess there's more fodder for my growing list of "Things I'll Never Have Time For."
3. David Yezzi appeared -- a nice surprise -- in my mailbox via The Poetry Foundation's "Poem of the Day." This poem is published in "Azores," I think, and while it's an excellent example of Yezzi as a formalist, and a formalist who's managed to make his metrical work sound very natural -- I much prefer the series of poems that give the collection its title. They're just lovely. READ THEM! ADD THEM TO YOUR OWN LIST OF "THINGS [YOU'LL] NEVER HAVE TIME FOR."

Okay. Time to go. The kiddies are up, the dogs are begging for breakfast, and I need to get my butt out of SAHM-mode and into Crazy-Schizo-Prof mode.