When snow calls all the shots [and all the shots are bad].

I was born in California, but didn't live there so long that it made me less snow-worthy. I'm pretty much a die hard Midwesterner now. But nature, what the fuck? We're snowed in again here in Akron, Ohio. The kids had a snow day on Tuesday, and everything (universities included) is closed today. Add to that the fact that Monday was a holiday, and I have two sick children who were out of school the days that we didn't have a snowtastrophe, and you get the strangest, least productive week ever on earth, I fear.

I had such ambitious hopes for this week! Working on sequencing my new manuscript. Writing poems. Reading (for work, and for fun). Annotating student poems in a leisurely fashion. But instead I've had kids coughing, puking, whining, thankfully not fighting because too sick, waking up at night, crying, making extravagant demands, etc. I did manage to teach my one class of the week and make it to my meeting, but shortly after I had to speed home to the infirmary.

So no new poems, no gym, no catching up (though I did get more sleep than usual, which is always welcome), very little reading, but you know what? So far I am not sick. I'm not sick! And that makes this all sort of okay. I also thought ahead and brought my student poems home with me, so hopefully I will be able to do some work. I need to learn how to annotate while being pestered.

Hoping the kids' strep tests come out negative, and that it stops snowing eventually. People looked at me like a lunatic yesterday when I was frantically filling my grocery cart, but I am rather glad I stocked up while I could.

Could this please be the last major storm of the winter?

Please?

Pictured above, this year's incarnation of the wind chime icicle.

Just like [ ].

I'm destined to be confused all week, but in a good way. Kid out of school today, but university closed tomorrow (good news for those of us who teach on Tuesdays, since we actually get a day off). That means no night class, and an extra week to hang out with student poems and the two books we'll be discussing: Money for Sunsets by Elizabeth Colen and Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina.

One of my favorite parts of discussing single-author poetry books is the day when everyone (hopefully...) brings the book to class, and you get to see the vast sea of lovely covers flooding the entire classroom. It makes me so happy.

Snowing like crazy out there. What the heck. Goodbye hint of green lawn. Yesterday I (optimistically) put out our "Welcome Spring" garden flag, and observed some daffodils growing around the foundation of the house. This morning the flag was stiff with ice and snow. It crunched like a potato chip when I unfurled it.

The daffodils should be tough enough to hack it.

In happier news, I read my new poems last night and I think people rather liked them. They were so much fun to read. I feel like a traitor sometimes because I always want to read my very newest poems and not my hits and dusties.

In the update department: Submishmash is even awesomer when you get an acceptance. Yeah!

I am trying to get back to writing formal, disposable daily to-do lists. I have a few items left for today, so will now sign off. Hope I don't need to add major snow removal to the list.

Underpin[n]ings

Thanks to the special miracle called Presidents (Presidents'? President's? Presidentses?) Day, my work pile is currently stabilized. Please do not interpret this as meaning that I am bored and idle and hankering to write a last-minute recommendation letter or to help you polish the gravel on your driveway. I have plenty to do. But I'm somewhat caught up, at least for this afternoon.

In most urgent news, there have been some new poems. Written by me! I am not especially in love with them, but they exist. I also found18-ish pages of poems I had forgotten about, written over the summer, so I've been chasing them around the yard with a paring knife. Or at least thinking about it.

In unrelated news, it's funny how a piece of lemon pound cake can completely turn my mood from gloomy to happy. Maybe it was the walk to get the pound cake. Or the fact that I told myself that it was okay to eat the pound cake instead of the last clementine lingering in my office fridge. I'm sure I will eat that too, by EOB today.

It's pretty empty here in the office right now. Where is everybody? It's warm out (my phone says 56 degrees) but too cloudy and gray to be truly frolicworthy.

I must confess that I've fallen a bit in love with Submishmash. I was a stalwart paper und envelope girl until now. This week I started kicking my ass a little in the submissions department, and wow, that Submishmash is just plain fun. We're even thinking of maybe using it for BOR.

Making a big trip to the post office tomorrow. Doing two readings in Cleveland this weekend. Hoping for more poems, and perhaps some relaxing, too, if I am lucky.

Ordinary(ish) time.

Can tomorrow really be just Wednesday? I think we have weathered enough (literally and figuratively) to deserve at least a Thursday, if not better.

AWP went by so quickly that I barely got to process it before it was over. Two of my UA Press homeboys, Nick Sturm and Michael Goroff, did a pretty sweet wrap-up over here at the press blog. Now I am heavily planning for AWP Chicago. It's going to be the fifth anniversary of Barn Owl Review, and there will be festivities. Stay tuned. In related BOR news, contributor copies and subscriptions are going out this week. It's a really awesome issue. So excited to get it out into the world.

Right now I'm full of energy in the ideas department, which is frustrating because all I can do is comment on poems and undertake administrative tasks. I'm doing two readings this weekend and I would really like to have a new poem for one of them. I am finding it hard to block out time to write lately. I believe I have written only 2-3 poems in 2011. I need to get my urgency back.

Still under ice and snow here, but there was some sunshine this afternoon, which made a rather enormous difference.

Rough drafts [and the people who do not love them].

Don't tell anybody, but my closets are disastrous, and my files of poems are even more disorganized. With my closets, sometimes I toss stuff (boots, etc) in there and just turn my back and slam the door and hope for the best. Mind you, that is very much not my standard operating procedure for anything else in my life. Sure, my office(s) are messy, but that's because I have a shitload of work, not because I'm sloppy.

So here I am with a landslide of poems that are 65% rough drafts (as in, some came out more finished or are revised, so I have sent them out) and I need to at least get them their immunizations and have their claws trimmed (cancel that) and ready them for the showroom. But it's just so daunting. There are so many of them. What if they overpower me? There's so much revising to do, which means that I got something wrong the first time around.

And then I find something like the above, which was waiting on the counter at the post office this morning, and it all seems so incredibly worthwhile.

We went away but then we came back.

Yeah, so we took our act to Washington, and now we're back. The snow didn't go anywhere. See that street up there? It's not covered with ice, is it? Sigh.

Between not having any readings or signings of my own work, and Panel Struck Down By Act of God, this AWP was all about celebrating other people's books. I felt like I went to this AWP as an editor rather than as a poet. I'm not sure that I feel completely comfortable that way. Okay, I know I don't, but as someone who tends to prefer promoting others over herself, I did like that part just fine.

And of course there was The Monkey & the Wrench, which sold out of our regular copies so we had to start selling the comps I'd brought. It was such a busy bookfair. I had flashbacks to being a barista in Ann Arbor. No downtime at the table whatsoever, which meant not being able to sneak over to signings, and subsequently missing a lot of friends. Such a bummer!

I arrived a day late and missed probably like a third of the people I wanted to see. I couldn't go to or stay at some of the offsites and parties due to claustrophobia. But otherwise it was a very fine AWP.

We did get to do some sightseeing, and that was one of my favorite parts. I always kick myself when I don't get to go to at least one museum, etc.

It's hard to believe it's all over.

Let's do it again next year.

Preemptive looting...

...and I haven't even left Ohio yet.

Bring it on.

Little House on the Tundra

Yeah, so there's been this certain weather situation. Water pouring from the sky, ice falling from the sky, snow eddying around in little freeznadoes. I know that a lot of folks have it worse than we do right now. I'm so thankful to have electricity (I have been charging everything constantly, just in case).

My shoulders are aching from smashing up ice and shoveling it, even though I was only able to make discernible progress on my front walk and steps, and back walk. The driveway is a lost cause. I think it may be a Chicago thing, but I always have to have my front stoop and walk cleared off. I remember the old ladies of the west side always clearing off their stoops. It's a courtesy thing.

The kids have had two snow days in a row. The university has also been closed for two days in a row. Yesterday we made a Funfetti cake to keep busy. Cabin fever aplenty.

So here's where we are. Right now 90% sure that we'll be leaving tomorrow for DC. Had been planning to be arriving there about now, but with the situation pictured above (that's my street), we are not going to chance it.

Other folks on my panel have suffered similar problems, and unrelated ones, and ultimately we are going to have to cancel our panel on geography and religion. It would be really nice if the AWP folks would let us do it next year.

Here's an excerpt from my paper.

AWP Panel Struck Down By Act of God;

Or, Two Jews, a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Mennonite Sufi Shaman, and a ________ walk into an AWP Panel: Geography’s Influence on Writers Writing Religion and Culture.

A Snuff Film Starring Your Childhood Home: Urban Devastation, Crumbling Steeples, and Midwestern Poetry as Testimony by Mary Biddinger

I was a strange sort of transplant. Chicago childhood. Michigan adolescence and coming of age. Obsession with Detroit (literary, historical, photographic). I drove around Detroit’s neighborhoods in a Jeep and took pictures of houses, though the best shot was of the 14-story mural of Barry Sanders on the side of the Cadillac Tower. I wrote a hundred poems about Detroit. Moved back to Chicago. Picked up where I had left off.

So this is how you become so indelibly tainted with a harrowing landscape that you find yourself getting angry in a museum.

Your anger isn’t just because of the economic injustices that created a Detroit of the kind we see today.

It’s because the people in the gallery are beginning to touch the photographs. They are running their tongues along the information cards. Some of them are pulling out mirrors and tossing their hair around a little bit. Pretty soon it will be a room full of naked bodies, but not because the museum-goers wish to be reborn into the frames.

What I mean to say is that it becomes borderline pornographic.

Of course we all, in some way, want to help.

--- * ---

So we're leaving tomorrow, and hopefully we will arrive in DC by late evening. I will spend some time at the Barn Owl Review + University of Akron Press table, which is A11. I also hope to make it in time to check out the Cleveland State University Poetry Center offsite reading at Asylum, 7-9 pm, knockout lineup.

At table A11 we will have BOR 4 for you to come marvel at (and purchase! please! it's our best issue yet!), and copies of all the new UA Press titles, including The Monkey and the Wrench.

Unrelated news:

I have an interview at The Fine Delight. Oh, and a really awesome profile here, also by Nick Ripatrazone.

Safe travels to all going to AWP, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Hope to see some of you soon!