mimsy and outgrabe

This week was a strange one, where I've vacillated between periods of extreme productivity and good humor and lower moments of stasis and frustration. To be honest, it feels a little like mania and depression, which is startling, but I'm going to stop just before the point of self-diagnosis and chalk it up instead to a weird mood swing, or bullshit like the full moon and maybe something fun and ridiculous like Mercury in retrograde. ( Is Mercury in retrograde? What does that even mean?) I have been in hiding from so many of my favorite people for weeks, mostly because I'm afraid of spreading my weird bad mood, which honestly has persisted since this spring and seems to be dissipating but then rears its ugly head again. If you're one of those favorite people, please be patient with me.  Anyway, let's focus on the positive, shall we? Some of my little wins this week have been poem-related. Something happened Monday morning and I woke up with ideas for po...

"Be happy; you're writing from the privilege of all your wits about you in your old age, under the thorn acacias by the noon sea, the light on all the places you have painted and hope to paint with the strenuous accuracy of joy, the village houses, the streets untainted by any history, by any thought or shadow on the blank canvas except from the sky; be grateful that each craft stays hard to do. In what will be your last book make each place as if it had just been made, already old, but new again from naming it." -- from "The Prodigal" by Derek Walcott Sure, this little ars poetica at the end of "The Prodigal" is the poet speaking to himself at the end of an illustrious career, and there are few parallels I can draw between the speaker of these lines and myself, but the passage serves as this lovely reminder of the joy found in the act of creation. And that in the end, we fight death by giving birth, over and over again, with new poem...