Wherein the author is almost asleep.

There's a really big, showy, obnoxious moon out there tonight, folks. I think it's making my cats crazy. The smallest cat, Klaus, was just apprehended while trying to steal a potato from the kitchen counter (the potato we're going to use to try that old trick with the broken lightbulb.... the joys of homeownership). I hear all kinds of other miscellaneous noise out there too, but whatever. Today I grocery shopped (at Marc's, land of the most narrow aisles ever, with both kids), washed tons of linens, took the kids to the rainforest at the Cleveland Zoo, changed shower curtains (unrelated to zoo trip), vacuumed entire house including basement, and washed all the floors excluding basement. Oh, and polished my daughter's shoes, and set up the coffee for tomorrow morning, and all kinds of other miscellany.

Tomorrow I am going to attempt, at one point, to do some annotations while the kids watch a movie. There's just too much to do. I'm still reading Ariel, and doing my dorky things like counting the number of poems and counting repeated words (and instances of repetition, and instances of repetition). I've found that I suddenly like the bee poems in the book, and I never did before. I'm looking forward to discussing the book with my students. I have to stop myself from photocopying even more "contemporary poems haunted by _______" for Plath. I already have a little bundle. I already have a little bundle. Will you marry it?

What else? Oh! Working on Barn Owl Review #3, that's what. This time I am putting the issue together myself, and we have a spectacular designer lined up. So exciting! I will update the contributors' list soon, I promise.

I say a few things about music here, on the Memorious blog.

Good night.

What's next.

Hi. I'm still here. I guess I had a busy week, or something. It took me a while to recover from the double dose of flu shots last Friday, but today I am finally feeling 100%. If I'm counting correctly, I got almost nine hours of sleep last night (not including some earlier, accidental driftings into dream land, wherein I had a very bizarre dream about carnival equipment driving down my street).

Last week was somewhat disrupted by my routine-smashing attraction to Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, a book that seriously caused me to consider not eating or sleeping until it was done. In 2010 I have also read Lit by Mary Karr (I felt awful one night reading it with a glass of champagne), which was good but not casbah-rockingly so, and now I am reading The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar. I wish I could read poetry books for fun, too, but I can't. I spend too much time evaluating them, or I get way too into them.

Reading Ariel again this week, and Now You're the Enemy by James Allen Hall, both for my classes. I wish I could feel the same things I felt about Ariel when I first read it twenty (!) years ago.

If you haven't read this yet, what are you waiting for? I want it printed on a t-shirt. A lady-style t-shirt, of course.

This week was a big one for po-news, as Steve Kistulentz won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award for The Luckless Age, and Gary McDowell won the Orphic Prize for American Amen. These are both spectacular manuscripts, and I am so excited that they've found such good homes. Congrats, fellows.

This is seriously cool. I'll be up in the next installment.

I'm back to sending poems out again. I even made a little (handwritten...sigh) chart and stuff. I can't move forward with my next project until I hear about some funding, but I hope I can still squeak some poems out. It feels gross not to be writing. I will be spending the afternoon with some of my favorite poet friends, though, so that is bound to energize me.

Oh, and I get to shop at Heinen's today for stuff for a delish dinner, and some of those wicked desserts they have. I wish Heinen's was closer.

I also wish that cats could vacuum up their own fur. What the heck.

All in a row.

Dear Clematis, you died. You're still hanging in there, however. Birds don't want to make nests in you now. Do you like that? Are you mad that you can't whisper to the other clematis around the corner, back on the garage, until spring is here? Would you like to comment on some student poems? What are your thoughts on marmalade? Tasty, or an abomination? What were your New Year's resolutions? Are you sticking with them so far?

I have successfully eaten several meals at a table, including breakfast, so there's some resolution progress inside the house while the clematis ponders its demise outside. We had a snow day on Friday, which caused major chaos in my "get ready for the semester" efforts, but I am catching up. There's been some exciting news, then some more exciting news, and I am starting to think that 2010 is a very good thing.

I'm off to teach my second class in a little while, and I am really excited. Not that I'm ever not into teaching, but this semester I am particularly charged up. The more administration I do, the more I appreciate being a teacher and an artist. Some day, I'll get to go back to those things full time again, I hope.

Wherein the author has a taste of her own medicine, and it tastes AWESOME.

Have you ever looked at an outdoor staircase and thought, damn, I would like to rope those stairs off with a seat belt thinger and pack a bunch of snow inside? If that's the case, then move to Akron, and you can see plenty of the above. It's really just a measure to cut back on shoveling, methinks, but it's still kind of hilarious when it's right outside the library. The yellow rope makes it look like fun. Perhaps if you queue up in front of it someone will eventually let you in for a frolic.

So far this has been an interesting week in the department of things lost and things found. This story became a lot happier a little while ago, when my son's long-lost comfort item was recovered. The other day we were visiting my friend, and it was dark when we left, and Baby (Ray's little stuffed animal lemur) somehow disappeared. We searched everywhere. But then my friend and his kids found Baby on a snowbank, miraculously unscathed. I can't wait to reunite Baby and Ray this evening. This is the first time one of my kids has had a consistent comfort item, and I was seriously upset about losing it.

The rest of the story? The part that actually has something to do with writing? Well, that would be the tale of the lost manuscript, or at least the lost sequenced version, which had been MIA for months, and finally reappeared. Once I found it, after I did a little jig and high-fived all four people who are in the office working this week, I three-hole punched the pages (terribly, I might add...think swiss cheese) and put them in a binder.

I had never tried that before.

Which is funny, because I have my thesis students put their poems in binders.

The thought had never occurred to me.

I mean, my mss have to be, you know, spread out across a hardwood floor.

But it is so easy to flip through and make changes!

And then read it all over again.

Completely awesome. I have no idea why it took me this long.

By the end of the week it'll be formatted and out in the universe.

Thank you, Saint Anthony.

In other news, if you look to the left you'll see the widget for our new Akron Poetry & Poetics fan page. Check it out for information on our new venture: The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, which I am co-editing with John Gallaher. I'm so excited to be starting this new series, and we have a fantastic lineup for the first volume, but I am also sad that John won't be publishing any more of his own poetry books in the Akron Series, now that he's part of our editorial staff and all. More on the new series soon.

Today I keep thinking I still have my hat on, but I don't. Do you ever feel like that?

I mind snow a lot less when it has those big sparkly flakes. I am getting some bizarre snowblowing muscles. I like the relative peacefulness of snow removal, but I would be very happy if it stopped for a little while.

Here I am on the way to the Press this morning. At least I don't feel like I still have my hat and hood on. Note bleak winterscape in the background, minus the students, who don't return until next week.

Three Poem Check-In, and the Inevitable.

Our colossal and now deceased Snowma'am sends happy greetings of the New Year. 2010 feels pretty okay so far. Actually, it feels kind of tired, and coffee isn't helping. The kids are watching Mary Poppins in the living room and shaking the entire first floor with their dancing. My eye hurts for some reason (confetti? no). But so far so good with the 2010, which is so much fun to type.

I did not see the blue moon last night. It was too cloudy. I'm not even sure it was up there. Anyone in Ohio see it?

Here's the big(ger) question: who was able to meet the "three poems before 2010 challenge"? Thanks to all who have already dropped me a line about it. I wrote four, and did some revisions, but having the kids home full time put a real dent in my plans for adding the new poems and revisions to my ms. The kids go back to school this week, which is the annual "how much can I get done in a week" week, and I hope it's a productive one.

I'm teaching two poetry workshops this semester, an advanced undergrad one and an MFA one. I have already collected the first round of poems for the MFA class, and I am so excited. I have taught workshops so many times, but it's always a different class, you know? I like it when I have a semester where I can teach all creative writing. Not that I don't like teaching lit, but there's something about carrying student poems around with you everywhere, battling that constant backlog of annotations, and being surprised every time you get something new.

I totally wasn't going to do resolutions, but this list is so awesome that I decided to make some anyway.

1. [Note: this resolution was made for me] After February 1st I will no longer add poems to my current manuscript, O Holy Insurgency. Instead I will send it out and just write new poems.

2. In the next week I will write the last two poems of the ms mentioned above, sequence it (finally), and let it chill.

3. I will start a new moleskine and actually use it. I noticed a serious drop in new poem production when I got lazy about this.

4. I will try to eat meals at a table like a normal person whenever possible. Typical day: eat breakfast standing up in the kitchen, eat lunch at my desk while working, eat dinner standing up in the kitchen or walking around the house. I don't imagine that's very healthy.

5. I will continue the following things I've already made good headway with: (*) Being more patient, especially with the kids, and not letting them drive me apeshit. (*) Doing something creative every day. (*) Appreciating the spectacular people in my life a bit more. (*) Maybe being a little less antisocial, maybe not, though. (*) Continuing to love my house and work hard to make sure it's the way I want it to be. (*) [Addendum] Letting things around the house slide a little, and handling things like cleaning in a triage fashion. (*) Trying to be more calm. Not letting stress from work get to me. (*) Continuing to enjoy, once again, things like trying new recipes (and eating them) since I wasn't able to do this for a long time. (*) Continuing to work on my budget, getting some tax help, and learning to do more with less.

6. I will somehow allow my poet side, editor side, teacher side, and administrator side to coexist harmoniously. Sometimes the editor and administrator back the poet and the teacher into a corner with a lot of cobwebs and centipedes and rattle them a little. The poet just zones out and feels a combination of anxious + resentful. The teacher freaks out and starts ransacking anthologies, looking for a Carlos Drummond de Andrade poem that was never actually written. I'd like these entities to be able to sit down at a table with some Sambuca and work out their differences.

My children are running around the house, talking about firewood, dogs, and cell phones. They just started fighting, and as an intervention I said something to the effect of: What difference does it make? Be creative. I think that may be my new slogan for 2010.