Confession Tuesday

Happy Tuesday, folks! Time for your confessions. Tell us a little about yourself and we promise to do the same. And if you're confessing on your blog, please let me know so I can stop in and say hello.

In Monday night’s episode of "How Sad Am I," featuring me, I read to the kids and sent them to bed at 7:45 p.m.—15 minutes early (told them to tuck themselves in), I fell asleep at 8:05 p.m., woke up at 11:30 p.m., read e-mail, started to write a new poem for tonight’s workshop (not sure if it will be ready in time), caught up on po-biz stuff, found a friend also working online at crazy hours, and made tentative lunch plans. I stayed up for another hour, went to bed, got up, and wrote this post.

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Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Mary Pinard’s classes at Babson about Underlife. I really enjoy talking to our business students because there are synergies to how poets and entrepreneurs operate: we are self-starters, work alone, surround ourselves with like-minded people, take pleasure in the process, and often work for little or no money.

These students asked questions I haven’t heard before—questions on the sequence and progression of the poems in my collection. Whenever I talk about Underlife, I find myself answering questions I never considered when writing the poems. I hope the students has as much fun as I did. It was a great way to kick-start the day.

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In case you missed it, the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival will take place May 13-14 in Salem, MA! I’m on the planning committee and am *extremely* excited to be in the mix. Lots of work ahead in a short amount of time.

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This past weekend, I was able to get back to revising my manuscript after stepping away from it for a few weeks. I think I expected too much, trying to finish it during the Dodge Poetry Festival. But the hope is to eke out a few hours to finish it this week, send it out to a few more readers, revise and send out the finished product in early November. Completely doable.

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Finally, I’m whittling away at my reading list. I’m reading Bob Hicok’s Words for Empty and Words for Full, and Susan Rich’s The Alchemist’s Kitchen. Quite the contrast in styles, but both books are wonderfully delicious reads.

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Spike Lee comes to Babson tomorrow!