The Waiting Really Is the Hardest Part (Damn you, Tom Petty)

I lost out on a book prize today—one I really, really wanted, from a press I admire, and which came with an optional residency in Italy. For the past two months, I've been in the running—first making the long list, then, just before Christmas, being notified that my manuscript had made it to the finals, along with five other manuscripts. One in six. That's not bad odds in the poetry book world, not bad odds at all. At Cider Press Review, it's not unusual for us to get 500 or more manuscripts submitted for a book award, if that gives you any inkling of what one-in-six means for a manuscript. I have no idea how many manuscripts were under consideration for this one book prize, but I doubt it was fewer than 300 or more than 1,000. Mine made it to the top six before the judges chose a book by someone else.

And I'm surprised by just how okay I am with the whole thing. I tend to be pretty relaxed about sending out work, basically blasé about getting rejection slips (or, as one writer I know calls them, letters of decline), almost as blasé about getting acceptances—although I'll be the first to admit that the latter feels much better than the former. The point is that my mood doesn't rise or fall based on what any given editor or reader thinks of my work.

In part, this attitude comes from my work at Cider Press Review. I know, from being on the receiving end of all those manuscripts (never mind the individual poems—I hesitate to even count those, but if you'd like an indication of what that entails, our submission period has been open for just under three weeks as I write this, and we've received almost 260 submissions—most of which contain three to five poems, so go ahead and do the math about what we're facing over the course of the next few months)…where was I? Ah, yes. I know, from being on the receiving end of all those manuscripts, that there are all sorts of aspects of awarding a poetry book prize that are way beyond the poet's control. I know what it feels like to fight for a manuscript and lose, what it feels like to fight for a manuscript and win (again, I prefer the latter), what it's like to think you know which manuscript an outside judge will choose only to be proven wrong. I know what it's like to make the phone call to tell a poet that his or her manuscript will soon be a book, and what it's like to write an email—like the one I got this morning—saying, in essence, how disappointed I am that a manuscript will not be a book, at least not this time around.

That knowledge makes not winning (I truly hesitate to use the word "losing" in this context—it's one thing to say I lost out on a prize, another entirely to simply say that I lost) easier. The email makes it even more so. At the same time, this manuscript is important to me, in ways that I haven't really figured out how to express. I've said before that it was important to me to do right by the poems I've included there, and I believe I've done so. And it's one thing for my poet friends to say they agree with me—no matter how much I admire them (and I do), they're still, after all, my friends—but it's another to have my work reach people I don't know with such power that they not only fight for it, but write me a note to let me know they were fighting for it.

I can't tell you how much easier it is to not have to wait anymore. Not winning is way easier than maybe winning.

I am not a fan of waiting. I never have been. It's not that I'm impatient, necessarily—poetry can't be rushed, not the composition and certainly not the revision. Teaching can't be rushed. Patience is a runner's friend: after nursing a sore knee over the summer and much of the fall, I want to get back to running 30-mile weeks. I want to get my long run up to 15 miles, just to prove to myself I can and to keep things interesting. I want to continue to get faster, too. But if I rush increasing my mileage, I'll get hurt. If I rush increasing my speed, I'll get hurt. So I need to be patient, and running is really good practice. I'm patient with students, with reading, with walking my mother-in-law—over the phone, no less—through adding a second email account to her Gmail, with any number of things. I'm not generally patient with myself, but I'm working on it. [Insert joke about how it's not going as quickly as I'd like here.]

Here's the thing I'm learning about patience: it's hard sometimes, sure, but it's much easier when I feel like I have some kind of control over things. In general, I like to take action. I like to move. If I want a new job (I don't!), I'll go find one. If I want a poem to appear in a specific journal, I'll send them work—again and again if I have to. I will, if something is important enough to me in the moment, drop everything else and focus my attention on doing everything I can to accomplish that goal. In general, I would rather be doing something; it doesn't always matter what it is.

With book prizes—with any publication, really—there isn't anything to be done. I've put together a manuscript I'm really proud of. The poems are strong, they do what they're supposed to be doing, and I've put them together in a satisfying order. I sent it out to some carefully-selected publishers. One of them announced a winner and gave no indication of finalists; one of them announced a winner and finalists and I wasn't on the list; an editor at a third sent me that really nice rejection  letter of decline this morning. A handful of others won't respond for a few months, most likely. That's the way it goes. I send it out and I wait.

The relief of today's no comes in it being time for me to do something again. Time to look up a couple of publishers, see where my work will fit best, send the manuscript out again. Time to look up a couple of more publishers for February (I try to send to two each month, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule). And yes, it's nice to get kind words from the handful of people I told about this particular book prize, nice to feel supported and loved and strong. Mostly, though, it's nice to take action. 

All-Poetry Autumn Wrap-Up and Link Festival

I'm going to say right up front that I didn't go about All Poetry Autumn in a particularly methodical way. A responsible blogger-poet would have kept track of the poetry she read, the poetry she wrote, all the ways in which she honored her totally-invented-for-no-apparent-reason process. I didn't do any of that, although I can tell you that APA 2013 was a staggering success from my perspective.

For one thing, it kept me focused on poetry, an often-difficult task during the Fall semester. I love me some fiction, especially some Scandinavian crime fiction (which is, by the way, not at all limited to that girl and her tattoo, a book I couldn't make it through), and I have a couple of Jo Nesbo-with-a-slash-through-the-o books that have been sitting in my iPad since the end of the summer. When I'm teaching, I regularly want some non-academic reading, books I can enjoy without thinking about them too much, the literary equivalent of a popcorn movie (although my standards for such are, I've come to learn, higher than average). Or Runner's World, back issues of which are also stacked up on my iPad. I knew going into the end of September that trying to focus on poetry during these past three months was going to be tough—it's basically the toughest time of my year to do something like that. But I'm a girl who's been known to enjoy proving herself, so there you go.

I had some rules, but not many: because I get paid to read student essays and other preparatory stuff for my teaching, I couldn't just not read prose. So APA had to apply to my non-academic reading. I also decided that reading prose geared toward my poetry was also permissible, as long as it was no stretch at all to explain it. I'm working on an essay about place in poetry—an aspect of my own work that's pretty obvious to anyone who's read more than a couple of my poems—so I had no trouble justifying my reading of Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, for example, or Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous (which is also about place, even though it sounds like a Harlequin romance novel about a rebellious witch and the ruggedly handsome warlock tasked with taming her). Diane Lockward's excellent craft book The Crafty Poet hasn't left my bedside table since it arrived, even though it contains essays as well as poems. The other thing that doesn't leave my nightstand? A notebook and a pen, because all three of these books prompted poems of my own, exactly the kind of result APA was intended to achieve.

In general, though, I read poetry. Lots and lots of poetry. I'm in the middle of Donald Revell's Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems, which is currently taking pride of place beside my bed. Right here on the breakfast tray I use as a lap desk, there are three books: a collection of Paul Celan poems (70 Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger), Mary Ruefle's Trances of the Blast, and an anthology of poems by runners which I happen to have work in: Bearers of Distance. I've also read Robert Hass' The Apple Trees at Olema, a book by fellow Cider Press Review editor Catherine Carter (The Swamp Monster at Home), Thom Gunn's Boss Cupid, which I must have read a dozen times now, the National Book Awards finalists The Big Smoke (Adrian Matejka) and Black Aperture (Matt Rasmussen), and tons of others. Some of them left me a little cold, some of them (like Black Aperture) left me gobsmacked. Some of them were recent and some of them had been kicking around on my shelves for years. Some of them were me returning to books I'd been meaning to get around to re-reading (like Catherine's book, or Gunn's). All of them were worth my time.

I also wrote poetry—it's too soon yet to say if any of it is worth reading, but it's been written. Or begun, at least. And I'm happy with some of the drafts. I revised older poems, some of which I hadn't previously really known how to handle. What's more, I filled up my tank with ways to think about my own work and the work of others. I found some new-to-me voices to admire. I kept poetry coming off the shelf for sales and coming out of the stacks at the library.

So, would I do it again? Absolutely. I have just begun to read prose again, skimming through an excellent and potentially dangerous (and much-longed-for) baking cookbook I received for Christmas, and spending the moments before sleep last night with the (signed!) copy of Lawrence Block's newest Bernie Rhodenbarr novel my brother sent me, which is always a good time, if a quick read. And the Nesbo books await, along with those back issues of Runner's World. Then again, the Celan translations are right here, next to my left hand, and I used part of an Amazon gift certificate to pick up Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano's already-essential book The Daily Poet, which offers a different prompt for every day of the year. I've drafted three poems in the past two days, and worked on revisions, and thought about my editorial work and my own writing in multiple new ways, so maybe some of that prose will have to wait a little longer…

On Making a List, Checking it (More Than) Twice, and Finding the Right Word for You

Some of you might know about Lisa Romeo's blog—I wrote a guest post for her a little while ago. She posts some great stuff both for and by writers, and one thing in particular that caught my eye recently was this post about I Did It lists. An I Did It list works differently from a To Do list: instead of listing the things you want to do, or should do, or would feel better to get off your conscience about not doing, you list the things you have done. This is especially appealing to me because I tend to start all my To Do lists by listing one or two things I've already done that day, for the sole purpose of being able to immediately cross them off the list. I may have other strengths, but I am amazing at crossing things off a list.

Lisa's list is geared specifically toward her writing, and before I started to compose my own list, I decided to take the same focus. Within just a few minutes, I had a fairly sizeable list, and it's grown over the past couple of days as I've thought of other things to add to it. Some of them are relatively little, like recording myself reading a friend's poem for a website or writing a blurb for another friend's chapbook. Some would be easy to overlook because they seem so obvious, like writing poems or keeping this blog. Others are huge—putting together a manuscript I'm really proud of, doing the early work for an anthology that a friend of mine and I are editing together, getting the chapbook Dear Turquoise—a small collection of poems that are incredibly important to me—out into the world.

But I'm not going to share the list. I've already shared more of it than I'd intended to. More on that in a minute.

Another thing I've been thinking about recently is my word for 2014. The poet Molly Fisk came up with this idea—or maybe she stole it from another poet, I don't know. We tend to share these things. Hell, it's not like the FTTDS lists were my idea, and look where they've gotten me. The idea is not to pick a word, but to let a word pick you. Last year, my word was towards (because I grew up reading a lot of British fiction—if you'd prefer to think "toward," I won't judge you. Much). I don't much remember how it came to me, but I knew it was right when it got there—I needed to be moving towards something. Anything would do. I was still struggling with grief, I had put my manuscript aside after having fiddled with it so much that it became unworkable, I was feeling stuck. At the same time, though, I was moving—running, getting stronger, getting healthier. It's not that I saw light at the end of the tunnel last December, because I didn't. I wasn't even looking for it. But I knew what I needed anyway, somehow.

This year, when Molly started asking on Facebook whether our word for 2014 had found us yet, I realized I hadn't been thinking about it at all. Once I put the invitation out there, however, it walked right in. My word for 2014 is yes.

Here's where it gets a little strange: part of finding my word for the year is looking up its etymology. Yes seems like a no-brainer. It's agreement, right? "Do you want a million dollars?" "Why yes, yes I do. Thank you!" But it's not that simple. Yes is also a way—and a strong one at that—of negating someone else's statement: "You don't like avocados." "Yes, I do!" Not only that, but while its roots are in the word yea, it was a more powerful form of agreement than yea. Think about it as the difference between yeah or yup and yes: if my response when Jed asked me to marry him was "Yeah," we probably wouldn't have gotten married (my response might have been "Yay!" but that's beside the point).

So yes doesn't always mean "I agree." It runs the gamut from absolutely to absolutely not. It's a flexible, contradictory word, and anyone who knows me knows I love the contradictory—I love that sort of mushy middle, where everything gets messy. That's where all the interesting stuff happens. And I really love the idea of having a word for the year that is itself so contradictory and complicated, that its false simplicity is part of that contradiction.

The I Did It list is a way of saying yes—and yea, and Yay!—to the things that I made happen this year. Or to the things I allowed to happen, because some of my accomplishments for 2013 are really more about giving things the opportunity to happen than they are about actively doing things. They're also about the work I did in order to be able to give them the opportunity to happen. If I had won an award, for example (I didn't), it would be easy for me to leave that off the list, because I didn't actually do anything—in grammatical terms, I was the object; the event occurred in passive voice: an award was given to me. But if I wrote the poem (and did all the reading and drafting and following-of-dead-ends and such that comes before and with writing a poem) and revised it and then put it out there into the hands of someone who was in a position to give it an award…well, then. That's active voice right there, right? I won an award. So that kind of thing—stuff I didn't do myself—goes on the list, as does the work I did to make it happen.

I'm still working on my list. I'll probably work on it right up to the end. Just during the time it's taken me to draft this post, I've added seven items to the list. SEVEN. To a list I thought was complete yesterday. And yesterday, a close friend of mine told me she hoped I'd share the list when I had it where I wanted it.

Despite the fact that I had found my word—yes—just an hour or so before I received that particular email, I told her no. I thought about it for maybe a minute: Am I supposed to say yes to this? Am I already turning my back on my word for 2014 before the year has even started? Then I realized that there are different ways of saying yes.

It is far too easy for us to compare ourselves to other people. Writers are particularly bad about this—maybe we pay more attention than non-writers do, or maybe we're just more open about it. We compare ourselves all the time. So-and-so just got her third book accepted at Such-and-Such Press, and I didn't even like the first two. Famous-for-Being-Famous Man just signed a book deal at Major Publishing House and he's not even going to write his own damn books. My Best Friend got nominated for a Pushcart and I didn't and I feel like a jerk for not being happy enough for her. My Other Friend is doing this or that cool thing that I haven't been asked to do. Guy-I-Only-Know-From-Facebook is writing for Salon. If you write, you've probably engaged in these comparisons, and you might not even know you're doing it. Sometimes you might come up well ("I'm way better than he is!") and sometimes you might not ("I could never write anything that good!"), but it's human nature, and it's compounded by the fact that writers by nature are observant beasts. We notice things. We're good at it. Combine that with how few writers—especially poets—can make their living writing, and things can get very, very ugly.

In no way did I want to be a part of that, especially not with my friends, people I love. It is far too easy, I told my friend, to compare our own work to one of these lists and then bludgeon ourselves with that list. It's especially tempting to do so without writing a list of our own, because we "don't have anything to put on it" because we "haven't done anything." If we're in the right place, we can celebrate another writer's accomplishments, especially if that writer is a good friend. If we're in the wrong place, we can create a circle of self-loathing: resenting ourselves for not measuring up, resenting the other writer for her accomplishments, resenting ourselves for not feeling generous or supportive enough, which means we don't measure up….

You can see where this is going.

So I said yes to my friend—and to all the other friends in that particular email string—by saying no to that specific request. I said yes to encouraging her to make her own list, and yes to being a source of support instead of a potential weapon. I said yes to my own list, yes to recognizing that I have kicked ass this year and deserve to feel happy instead of vaguely guilty about it because I have friends who are struggling, yes to taking the things I truly deserve and deserving the things I take. The coming year is the Year of Yes, but before we get there, I hope to spend another post or two talking about where I've been—how the running goals went, in particular, but also a report on the newly-ended All-Poetry Autumn.

Meanwhile, I'd encourage you to think about writing your own I Did It list—as a writer, in another aspect of your choosing, or just for the year in general. I'd also encourage you to see if a word for 2014 finds you. Open the door, as Molly Fisk says, and it will find you.

Off with the Old, On with the New

Maybe you know this about me already: I don't like to shop. I call myself cheap, but I'm not—I gladly spend money on friends and family members, I firmly believe that large purchases should be the best whatever-you're-buying that you can afford, Jed and I donate money to charity. We tip very well, we pay our taxes, we help out friends and family from time to time as need be. I buy a lot of books directly from small poetry presses, because I believe in what they do. All that kind of stuff. And I don't care about things—there are precious few objects in this world that I think of as, well, precious, and most of those are valuable for sentimental reasons.

I do, however, take care of my things, but not for the reason most people probably think I do. I take care of my things because I find waste arrogant. Please don't get me wrong—everyone needs to make his or her own decisions on these issues, and priorities are going to be different for everyone. I just wrote—and deleted—a whole long paragraph talking about the ways in which I deviate from my ideals, but it was boring, so I won't make you read it. You're just going to have to trust me when I say that I truly believe everyone is capable of making individual decisions about this stuff, and since I'm living in a glass house over here, I'm not looking for any good throwing stones. Hell, I'm not even wearing my glasses at the moment, so I probably couldn't hit anything even if I tried.

The bottom line is that Jed and I would generally rather buy quality items and repair them rather than replace them. And since I'm not a fan of the work involved in repairing them, I try to take care of them to begin with, whether this means not dunking our 20-year-old wooden salad bowl into soapy water to clean it or making sure our even-older cast iron skillet gets well dried out after we use it or trying to keep up on routine car maintenance. I find waste arrogant, and being wasteful goes against my environmentalist leanings, which might, now that I think of it, be part of why I find it arrogant. I know things need to be thrown away, but if I can limit the amount of those things—through taking care of my stuff so it lasts longer but also through things like  composting, recycling, and refusing wasteful crap when it's handed to me (seriously, why on earth would I need to put a bag of potatoes INTO A SECOND BAG in order to carry it out of the store?)(and before you get all Ah-HA! You should be buying loose potatoes and putting them in your own bags! let me just stop you by saying that my store doesn't sell loose organic potatoes and I do bring my own bags. Plus, you need to go re-read the paragraph above this one, since you obviously weren't paying attention to my little I'm-not-judging-because-nobody-is-perfect spiel.  So there, you pedant). At any rate, a better word than "cheap" is probably "frugal," but "frugal" conjures up images of dowdy women sitting on hard wooden furniture, darning socks by the light of a candle made out of the drippings gleaned from the birthday cakes of her younger, more extravagant relatives. With "cheap," I can at least enjoy the hyperbole.

I have also, since I started running, gotten really into buying used when I can. For the past year and change, most of my clothes have come from Goodwill or other thrift stores (mostly Goodwill, because there's a pretty good one close to me). I'd say that I rarely buy anything new, but a ridiculous number of the items I've bought from Goodwill have come with the tags still on them. A pair of $130 wool Michael Kors pants for six bucks? Why yes, thank you, don't mind if I do. My love for thrift shopping has risen dramatically as my sizes have shrunk because I really am too cheap to buy an entire new wardrobe every season, which is pretty much what I have had to do. I live in New England, where the seasons are actual seasons—by the time it gets warm enough again for me to pull out the skirts I was wearing just a week or so ago, they will no longer fit. Nor do any of the clothes I was wearing last winter, with the exception of a couple of  sweaters that are meant to be oversized (but are getting kind of ridiculous even so).

All this to say that this morning, after yet another run where my pants started sliding down my hips somewhere in the second mile, I decided today was the day where I would bite the bullet and pick up some new running clothes. I'd been keeping an eye out for them all summer in Goodwill, and managed to pick up a couple of things—a long-sleeved wicking shirt here, a short-sleeved-but-tighter-weave shirt there. There was no luck with pants, though—running clothes in general take a beating, and running pants probably bear the brunt of it (although bras certainly earn their keep) in terms of friction and all sorts of other issues you can probably figure out if you've ever, you know, worn clothes. I just couldn't find anything used that was still in good shape, and the same went for jackets. I do know that runners get very attached to the clothing they have that works for them, and tend to wear it into the ground, and that they get loyal to their brands, so there's not a lot of this-doesn't-fit-right going on out there. Or maybe we're all hoarders. I'm not sure. In any event, the pickings at Goodwill were slim. And it's getting chilly out there.

I managed to spend over $250 on clothes today—mostly for me, although I did get a pair of running pants for Jed—and I'm not done. I'm going to need a couple more pairs of pants or tights if I'm going to keep running outside this winter (which I am). On the plus side, I didn't have any kind of panic attack. I found a pair of running tights that are made out of recycled plastic bottles, which may have assuaged my guilt a bit. I got two jackets of different weights, which will get me through the winter. I got a pair of long-sleeved wicking shirts and some tights to help me get a little more wear out of my heavier skirts before I shrink out of them, too, and four camisoles (also very tough to come by used) because they're part of my teaching uniform in the colder weather. There was probably some other stuff that I'm not remembering right now.

And it's supposed to make me feel good, right? People have been telling me things like how I deserve it, or otherwise talking in ways that imply that they think shopping is some kind of reward. I "get" to buy new clothes—it's one of the great "advantages" of losing weight, this justification of shopping, of spending money on myself. As a Facebook friend (and fellow poet and runner) was saying earlier today about her own process, I'm supposed to feel like I am somehow better, more complete, more acceptable, because I am smaller. I'm supposed to hate my larger clothes and be happy to be rid of them because they are representative of a time when I was, despite my size, less than. And that's troubling enough, but the added layer of fulfillment that I'm supposed to get just from buying crap? I don't get it.

It doesn't feel wasteful—I'll get my outgrown (ingrown?) workout clothes as scrubbity clean as I possibly can and donate them along with the rest of the stuff I can no longer wear. One of my friends will probably take some of it; my mom might take some of it when she's up for Thanksgiving; the rest of it will get donated and someone will get a bargain. But it also doesn't feel like I am in any way completed by the process. What I feel is a vague satisfaction that I won't freeze my ass off on my next run, either because my pants aren't warm enough or because they're falling to my knees. I'm pretty happy about one of the jackets because I haven't had a spring/fall weight jacket in well over a decade, and I'm sick of having to choose between freezing and wearing a winter-weight jacket when it's only about 45 degrees out. And because it'll do double-duty as an outer layer for running on really cold days. Plus, it's cute and sporty and makes me feel like an athlete—a fast athlete. A fastlete. Did I need any of that stuff? Well, the pants, probably, yeah. But the rest of it? I probably could have figured out a way to manage. Will having it make my life easier? Yes, both because it will take away an excuse to keep from running and will keep me comfortable while I'm doing so.

But does it make me complete? Is it somehow reinforcing the idea that I am deserving? I can't say that it does. And I'm more than a little worried about the idea that it is somehow supposed to. I've been writing—and reading—some really good poems lately. I've got great students in my classes this semester (as usual). I've got projects in the works that I'm excited about and a manuscript that feels…fully cooked, somehow, and despite the fact that I've been nursing a persnickety knee for most of the summer, I kicked total ass in a 5K last weekend (Seriously. I broke my 5K personal record by over ninety seconds and left Jed in the dust and—most importantly—finished feeling good and strong) and have twice in the past week broken the 10-minute-mile mark for the last half mile of my run and felt fabulous doing so instead of spent. I feel powerful and mighty. I've been amassing a collection of really sweet notes and emails and such from people I haven't met, complimenting my work. I have a job I love and a creative life that fulfills me and a husband and home I adore and two hilarious dogs.

Jockey, as much as I love them, doesn't make running tights that can give me any of that (although they can help with the whole running well thing, so props to them for that). My Columbia jacket is going to keep me warm, but it's not going to make me complete no matter what size it came in. Would owning these socks or this underwear make me feel like a more valuable human being?

Well, okay. You got me there.

But generally speaking, no. At the risk of sounding preachy, we really need far less than we think we do, and beyond that, far less than we want. Another Facebook conversation earlier this week (although this time with people I actually know relatively well) dealt with gratitude, specifically with this gratitude study. I encourage you to watch the video, but I'll say here what I said then: I know for a fact that people who practice gratitude are happier, and that the biggest differences can be seen in the people who need it most desperately. I often say that running saved my life, in more ways than just the physical benefits—and I believe it. But so did stumbling into the routine of listing, most every day, five things that don't suck. The bar is set deliberately low, but it is still a way of acknowledging gratitude. Buying more shit won't make anyone happy, not for long. The happiness that brings is fleeting at best, especially if, like me, you're not a fan of shopping. But gratitude just gets better. It always fits, you don't need a receipt to return it, and it's always the perfect color. What more could I want?

Except those socks. I really, really want to be grateful for those socks. (Jed thinks they're crazy, by the way. Boys. Snort.)

Decisions, Decisions

Astute readers may have noticed that I haven't been writing as many blog posts recently. The FTTDS lists are sometimes missing and often late (I'll try to be better about that—this whole have-to-be-somewhere-in-the-morning thing takes some getting used to during the first couple of weeks back at campus). The longer essays haven't been here much at all.

It's not that I've run out of things to say—I've got tons to talk about, friends, and I'll be trying to figure out ways to fit it all in. But I've been writing a lot of poems—a LOT of poems—often long after I should have turned the light out and gone to sleep. Writing them, reading them, occasionally revising them. I've got a couple of major editorial projects on my plate at Cider Press Review and an even bigger one in the works (that's still under wraps for now, but I'm sure I'll be talking about it here, too, once the time comes).

I came back from my week-long conference in Connecticut artistically revived, as you might have noticed. It’s not always easy to hang on to that as the semester grinds on—there are papers to read, all of which need thoughtful comments; emails come in at a record pace; I’m developing workshops both on-campus and off, both as a professor and as a poet. And life outside of being a poet/professor carries its own demands. I don’t think of any of these things as chores, generally speaking. I love my life, and I’m blessed to be able to do so much work that I love every day, to be both artistically and academically fulfilled, to have a home life that I cherish. But sometimes that cherished home life and fulfilling academic life can be a drain on the artistic part. The editing—even though it’s editing poetry—can also distract me.

I know it’s not fall yet—and as an avid hater of winter, I hang on to summer until September 21st, and I will employ fisticuffs if necessary to defend summer’s reign—but I’ve already declared All Poetry Autumn in my life. This means that in my spare time, the only reading I’ll do will be dedicated to poetry. It might not always be poems—craft books count, as do essays about poetry and poets, and books that I can use towards my own writing. For example, right now I’m reading a cheery little number called The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. It’s part philosophy, part social commentary, part discussion of the effects of torture on both the victim and the torturer. It’s not, in short, a beach read. But Elaine Scarry has a lot to say about our perception of pain, and while she states pretty clearly that her discussion is about physical, not emotional pain, I’m not so sure about that. I’m seeing all sorts of parallels to my writing, and I want to continue to explore these topics, despite the fact that this particular book is so dense that I’m lucky to make it through 10 pages in a day (in fact, I put it down a couple of weeks ago and haven’t picked it back up yet—but it’s sitting right here, on my desk, waiting).

Mostly, though, I’m working my way through my heavily-burdened poetry shelves. I’ve read manuscripts for three friends since the beginning of August. I’ve read craft essays. I’ve read halfway through Robert Hass’ new and collected, re-read Catherine Carter’s fun and disturbing and thought-provoking The Swamp Monster at Home, re-read Derek Walcott’s excellent White Egrets, begun Diane Lockward’s fabulous craft book The Crafty Poet (which, really, every poet on the planet should buy right now). Martha Ronk’s book Partially Kept is waiting for me on the desk in my office as I type this (as is a second copy of The Body in Pain…whoops. Sometimes having access to multiple interlibrary loan systems is a dangerous power). And I’ve drafted an almost ridiculous number of poems, considering how tooth-extractingly, painfully slow writing has been for me in the past couple of years. I’m writing them, putting them aside, writing another when it comes. I’m not revising much or obsessing or thinking about publication. I’m just writing, generating material I can turn to later when I’m not being as generative.

So I recommend you all start on your own All Poetry Autumn, in whatever form that may take for you. What do you miss? What part of yourself have you been starving while the other parts—sometimes less worthy, sometimes not—feast? Spend a little time listening to yourself, think about the things you regret not having time for. Resolve to steal a little time from something else. Then pick a time range—a week, a month, a season—and find a way to feed that need. I recommend starting conservatively, say with a week, because I’m one of those people who likes to keep resetting goals upward until I have no chance of meeting them. In other words, do as I say, not as I do.

Other aspects of your life will probably suffer. We can’t create time. I miss my Scandinavian crime fiction already, for example. I miss Jon Stewart, whom I now only see in clips online. I miss Tim Gunn, since I have completely skipped this season of Project Runway. But this shit is important and I want to try to honor that for a little while more. I already see the difference in my writing life, and that satisfaction and concentration is creating an ability for me to be more present in the other parts of my life. I need to be fully on-campus when I’m on campus, because I won’t be checking my email at 9PM. I need to be fully engaged in conversation with Jed when we’re talking, because later on I won’t want to stop writing to talk to him. I need to get my writing in now, because I’m teaching in the morning. It all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, and the picture gets clearer and clearer as I go. Maybe there’s a piece in there for Jon Stewart and Jo Nesbo and Tim Gunn and maybe there isn’t, but I’ll figure that out once I’ve got some more pieces in place.