mimsy and outgrabe

This is the end of a very long two weeks. The micro-sabbatical I'd planned for spring break did not go at all the way I'd intended, but at this point, it's difficult to care.  The Friday before the break my father went into the hospital for an infection and spent the week bouncing in and out of intensive care, since the infection severely dehydrated him, fucked up his organs, and sent his heart off-kilter.  He's okay now (fingers crossed, knock wood, god-willing, whatever), but I spent most of the recess close to my phone, twitching, not wanting to bother my mother, who sent regular updates but was overwhelmed with a host of responsibilities once my dad fell ill. I tried not to be overly dramatic or pessimistic, but for a while, without a lot of information or even the possibility of traveling south (because no one who arrives with three kids, which I would have to do, is helpful to someone in intensive care OR the person looking after him), I imagined the wor...

You know what's awesome? I'm now eligible for old-lady poetry awards. That's right. Not that there are a ton of over-40 awards, but when they come around, I could totally throw my purple hat in the ring. * A quick internet search has corrected me. I would throw my RED hat in the ring. Also, I don't recommend doing that internet search. The results are so saccharine you'll have to bleach your eyes. I took one for the team, ya'll. * Anyway, I'm still working on submitting my full-length to lots of places (i.e. just throwing my hard-earned money at the universe, essentially) AND today is the last day of classes/office hours before Spring Break, so I'm looking forward to my micro-sabbatical next week. * If it happens. My dad's health is a little precarious at the moment, and we might have to take a quick trip south to help out. * I plan on working on "Accountability Partners" -- my play that is not my verse play ...

Today I'm coming off that glow that arrives during, and just after, working on something you're obsessing over for about 24 hours straight. It's amazing how empty I can feel of ideas and music and language for so long and then, thankfully, they all come back in a flood and I create something that makes me excited, happy, and that I read and feel like, "yeah, that's a poem ."  In one of my graduate classes, back when I was a fucking baby with stars in my eyes, Derek Walcott said that most of what we write, if we're lucky, is just good verse. Every once in a while (for him), or once in a lifetime (me), we write a poem. So currently I feel like I wrote a poem, but knowing myself fairly well at this point, I'm conscious of the fact that a few months from now I'll probably look back at the piece and regard it as merely good verse. And that's okay. Because there are fewer stars in my eyes and I'm not quite so young (although maybe I act...

So, the micro-sabbatical was a good idea and totally, wholly worth the planning, effort, work and (some) trouble, but like the best-laid plans, it didn't deliver everything it promised when it was being conceived in my head. For one, you may have noticed -- and been grateful for -- a conspicuous absence of blog posts, right after I'd written something like, "lookout, I'm gonna blow up your feed," or whatever. It turned out that it took me far, far too long to write that first/only blog post of the micro-sabbatical -- like, about two hours -- and that's probably because I haven't written in the blog for a long time and it always takes me a while to get back into the rhythm of the thing, and writing prose. So, when I'd spent a good part of my precious kid-free, solitary-in-the-house time writing about writing the verse play but not actually working on the play itself, I decided that blog posts were not as beneficial when you're working with a h...

Where did Day 1 go, you might ask? Read on. (If you're not asking, see you some other time!) Last semester I managed to carve out time during the morning to read and write, and that was going swimmingly for about, oh, the month of September, until the inevitable grading and committee-work creep took over, and then I didn't write much at all. There were occasional two-hour spans of time during October, November and December as part of a program I organized at Stuffolk through our faculty union -- and these sessions were good and productive, but I spent most of that time sending out submissions or writing things for the college, and not doing any genuine creative work -- or creative work that I found, well, satisfying. And, as you know, that's not great. Particularly if I would like to keep calling myself a writer. But -- in the moments in between papers, or driving from one campus to another for yet another meeting -- I thought back to the last two times I ma...