mimsy and outgrabe

Today was good! I managed to turn in the freelance reading group guide I was a business-day behind on (if I'm not careful, they're not gonna use me anymore), AND finish my latest myth poem, AND get the oil changed in my car before our trip to Virginia tomorrow. I felt so productive I'm taking a little time-out, although this could be a bad move because there's a pile of clean laundry downstairs that's about 4 feet deep and needs to be folded. How DOES one household generate so much laundry? Oh, AND, I'm writing in my blog while the boy takes a late-in-the-day nap and the girl does . . . wait, what is that child doing? Why is it so quiet in here? *Pause for investigation* She's playing Angry Birds while her brother naps. Phew. So anyway, where was I? Writing about writing in my blog. Oh yeah -- THERE'S another accomplishment. (To tell you the truth, I'm feeling a little guilty about letting her play video games, and then admitting it online, but ...

On Friday I finally met with A.P., after what seemed like an eternity, to discuss poetry, and more specifically, our poems. Really, I should say that we met to discuss our poems, and that a more general discussion of poetry developed from our responses to those poems. I have other friends who write poetry who, in turn, have other friends who write poetry also and with whom they conduct weekly or bi-weekly or monthly or yearly workshops. There was an article in Poets & Writers (this month's issue) about the importance of writing groups, but I'm sure most people missed it because this was also the issue in which they posted the oh-so-controversial MFA Program rankings . (By the way, the editorial in Slate that I've just linked to is about as bogus as the rankings themselves -- enjoy!) Anyway, W(here)TF was I? Ah, yes. The column in Poets and Writers by Ann Napolitano was a nice account of how the novelist has continued to maintain her friendship and writing relat...

Yesterday I worked myself into a frenetic, worried mess. I spent my writing hour(s) doing more reading than writing, which in itself was okay -- I was reading critical essays about fairytales, and taking notes and thinking about how my own fairytale poem should be shaped. But then, after the quiet period of the morning was up -- the boy and the girl having decided between themselves at some point that this would be The Day of Fighting and Not Listening -- I attempted to write out a schedule for my sabbatical. The results were rather disastrous. That is, to my apparently fragile psyche they were disastrous. If you look at it from the standpoint of my house and the kitchen cabinets I gutted and cleaned throughout the entire afternoon, the results were fabulous! (More overwhelming stress, please! I'll have this house whipped into shape in no time!) I went kind of bat-shit crazy on the inside. This sabbatical scares me. I think I've voiced that as a joke before, but I'm jus...