mimsy and outgrabe

It is amazing how good you feel about 24 hours after being sick, simply because you aren't sick anymore. Good health sure is underrated, isn't it? That was the beginning of last week. A. and I came down with some gross 24-hour virus thing but thankfully none of the urchins we live with came down with it too, and now we're better and we can return to the business of, well, you know -- busyness. It was around this time that I was attempting to reinstate some past habits/behaviors simply to help me get through the end of the semester -- scheduling blocks of time for grading and avoiding all other commitments, doing quick and brief journaling in the mornings just to get my head wrapped around what I needed to accomplish for the day -- and then boom, sick, and a lot of my motivation deflated. I'm going to try and get back into it, though, because for as much as I kind of loathe the gimmicks and jargon of the Productivity world (read: market), a lot of their tips an...

It's Columbus Day, a holiday for the grade schools, so my non-duty day (Stuffolk's term for the day during the week we don't teach classes) will actually be filled with lots of duties, just not academic ones.  There are a lot of housekeeping details to take care of after our house was ransacked for the boy's 4th birthday party . . . which managed to be a good party for him -- really just one big play-date with his little friends, dressed in their superhero costumes, without a lot of structure but WITH a whole lot of chaos. Somehow, between the herculean efforts of my sister, her boyfriend, and my husband, we managed to get the house ready for the party even though, about two hours before the party was scheduled to begin, we had a major plumbing incident that covered most of the kitchen in debris from the garbage disposal and required dismantling part of the pipes in the basement.  I still don't know how A. managed to keep calm and cool and be persistent an...

This is not a good way to begin the week, I suspect. Last week was a major hiccup in the writing/sabbatical process. The Doodle became sick with a fever around Monday evening -- and so he was home from school until Thursday, and I didn't get much accomplished on Tuesday and Wednesday. I struggled with revisions of old poems in between playing with Legos and completing puzzles with the boy, so there was some writing done, although honestly I don't know how productive it was. My major accomplishments ended up being 1) lit-mag research -- I found some really interesting new magazines (more on them later) 2) submissions and 3) the organization and "clean up" of my computer files (I had multiple drafts of poems saved between my laptop and my zip drive, and this clutter was a source of major confusion lately). I had about one day of good writing -- Thursday -- and, true to form (no pun intended), I spent the entire day focused on working out a stanza to one of the ...

I've just spent approximately two hours working on one stanza of my wretched poem. It didn't start off wretched -- I feel, very keenly, that my first (free verse) draft was far more successful than my formal verse attempts have been. And yet I continue to try to force this thing. Two weeks ago I began trying to rewrite the second section of my poetry manuscript in formal verse. I'm writing something that approximates a fairytale, and is narrative in nature. So I thought I'd try Edmund Spenser's Spenserian stanza, which is written in iambic hexameter and ends with an "Alexandrine" line (an iambic heptameter line, which employs a caesura, and forms a couplet). This is according to Lewis Turco's Book of Forms, which I'm kind of regarding like my bible right now, and trolling every so often for options regarding form and also to just make sure I'm on the right track. As you'll see from my first post, I thought it went well. And then a day o...