mimsy and outgrabe

This week I worked on the Prose Project even though I have my doubts and misgivings about the direction I've started on, I'm trying to be calm and just allow myself to write what may very well be nonsense. I'm trying to give myself space to try things, to fail, to start again, and to play. Particularly because -- other than reviews and this blog -- prose writing isn't usually my thing. I finished a fiction book this week and I'm still reading Poets at Work , which is wonderful and strangely ... well, comforting, for lack of a better word. I'll be sad and bereft when I finish it. The Lowell interview is my favorite thus far, although I also just began the Walcott review -- and I love reading it because it reminds me of being in his classes, and also the few precious times I had conversations with him outside of class. But it also might end up be my favorite because of what he says in the interview, and how it resonates alongside other things I've been engagin

After abandoning the blog during the pandemic year, I'm ready -- I think -- to return to it. My year has been no more fraught with ugly change and professional and personal turmoil than anyone else's -- and, as the pandemic has wrought across the world some pretty devastating consequences, from job loss to the loss of loved ones,  my year has probably held a good deal less trauma than many other people's.  Still, I wasn't in the frame of mind to report on the banality of remote teaching, sheltering in place, homeschooling, grocery delivery, and endless dishwashing. Nor was I quite ready to spill my innards onto the proverbial page about a newly developing chronic illness, or a tired drama that began two years ago with family members and climaxed in the most devastating and humiliating way last December.  Even writing those last two sentences makes my stomach turn. So that's all I'll say about any of that, for now at least. In an effort to reclaim something of my