mimsy and outgrabe

The girl is, apparently and finally, disease-free. Today will be filled with grading, a club meeting, and a class! Woohoo! In between breaking up fights between Blondie and her pesky little brother, I cleaned a little (dishes are done, some of the laundry has been conquered) and ran a few errands. Also, I checked my work email and shuddered at the amount of committee meetings that are beginning to clog my calendar. Then, desperate for distraction, I read and mulled over the following: 1. This article in Beyond Margins on ignoring one's "life" in order to write. 2. This interview in TriQuarterly with fellow Hyacinth Girl Press author Brooklyn Copeland. 3. This article in the Washington Post that involves fake busking, Bach, and a violin prodigy named Joshua Bell -- all in the interest of social science. It's a good reminder that this week I should have -- in between shuttling between CVS and home for Children's Tylenol and Gatorade, swearing under my ...

I have a slight crush on Joshua Mehigan right now, partially from his book of formal poems titled The Optimist , which is -- yes, you guessed it -- sitting on my treadmill and being read during 5 minute warm ups and cool downs -- but mostly because of this article published in Poetry Magazine last year, which I just got around to reading. (Kids in bed, husband at work = interweb skulking). I'm ending the evening on a slightly depressed note, however. After reading Mehigan's essay, I made the mistake of scrolling through the 25 comments posted to the Poetry Foundation's website in response to it. It turns out that the same self-important assholes who troll the HuffPost and NYTimes and AOL sites also read and feel free to vomit all over the Poetry Foundation. Is nothing sacred? And of course, I know the answer to that. No, no, nothing is sacred. I can't forget this, after all -- I'm followed around the house most of the day by a three year old who refers to me a...

I'm up late. But at least I'm up late because I've been writing, and not because I've been skulking aimlessly on the interwebs, which I have a tendency to do when I'm tired and mush-brained. (Hopefully the tired-and-mush-brained-ness didn't result in tired and mushy poetry. We'll see tomorrow, when I wake up and reread tonight's work.) I haven't had a chance to write much this week -- both of my children have had colds, probably some distant cousin of the plague I had earlier in the month. The youngest (the boy) insisted that he was too ill to go to school on Monday, and so I let him stay home and I did what I could in between multiple trips to the kitchen for snacks (apparently the plague didn't affect his appetite) and playing puzzles and turning on the TV for 10 minute intervals of Wonder Pets or Jake and the Neverland Pirates or whatever nonsense attracted his attention before he decided he was hungry again. Then Tuesday morning the g...