mimsy and outgrabe

I've noticed -- maybe you've noticed, if you pay attention to when these posts come out -- that I'm on more of a biweekly schedule with the blog of late. It's not a bad thing, really. I am often negligent in posting to the blog because on Friday mornings, when I would usually write a blog post, I'm busy still working on the poem, and when 9:30 rolls around I switch to the Long Form Friday mode, and work on, well, long-form projects. The poems are turning into a kind of long form project themselves, developing into what is undoubtedly a manuscript -- but I'm nervous about assigning anything formal to what I'm working on. Lately, I've slowed down in the poem-generation, compared to my pace in August and September. Part of this is because I see a kind of narrative emerging, and that narrative dictates certain kinds of poems that must be written; and this is kind of unfortunate, because I don't want anything to dictate any direction at this point. I...

Stuart Downs, one of my undergraduate instructors at James Madison University, died on Saturday. It was unexpected (at the age of 63) but he died of natural causes. I'm sure this doesn't comfort his family much. I'm not sure it comforts me. I miss Stuart. I did miss Stuart, while he was alive and we were in different parts of the country, but I kind of thought I'd see him again on one of my trips back south. Our communication over th e years since I left JMU was brief and sporadic but it meant a lot to me. He was an incredibly generous and gracious instructor, mentor and friend. He treated his students with respect, while he challenged us, and he was unfailingly supportive of our endeavors. Above all, he was kind. I adored his Open Studio class. It changed the way I looked at art and writing and collaboration. He treated me as a peer. He treated us all as peers. From Stuart, I learned what it means to be an artist – it means you have to acknowledge the a...