Confession Tuesday
Happy first Tuesday in October! Time to confess. Share a little of yourself with us and we'll promise to do the same.
****
Had so much fun at last night's Improbable Places Poetry Tour reading! Colleen Michaels is da bomb! Once again, she uses poetry as a means to pull together a community. The reading was held in an auto body shop. (An auto body shop? Yes, an auto body shop!) It was terrific.
Details to come in my next post.
****
Afterwords I went out with a group of poets and my friend Jennifer said that I had "teacher face." I knew exactly what she meant: that look of exhaustion from grading an endless sea of student papers and poems. Last night's face was born out of the realization that I had 10 more papers to grade by morning.
Happy to say I woke up at 5 a.m. to finish the job. Teacher face should subside by the afternoon, I hope. Nothing a hot tea with lemon and sugar can't fix.
****
Feels like all parts of my life are in overdrive. Kids, teaching, Mass Poetry, my poetry--you name it, all are equally important. So I keep coming back to the idea that if everything is important, nothing is important. Sounds very nihilistic, doesn't it?
****
On the poetry front, I have been writing lots of drafts and lines waiting to for some attention. Need to find a solid block of time to convert my chicken scratch into poetry. A girl can dream.
****
I have new poems out at JMWW. Thanks to Ned Balbo for selecting my poems.
****
Last week, I went to a talk/poetry reading by Richard Hoffman at Endicott College. He said something that I've been carrying with me since the reading. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, that if you don't tell your own story, in the context of the larger world view, someone else will tell it--and you won't like their version. Meaning, if we don't write the stories of our lives, we'll be left out of history. We give history its context. So no matter how tired I've been the past few days, I think of that quote and begin to write.
I don't ever want to be out of anything. Ever. I keep on keepin' on!
Happy Tuesday, folks.
****
Had so much fun at last night's Improbable Places Poetry Tour reading! Colleen Michaels is da bomb! Once again, she uses poetry as a means to pull together a community. The reading was held in an auto body shop. (An auto body shop? Yes, an auto body shop!) It was terrific.
Details to come in my next post.
****
Afterwords I went out with a group of poets and my friend Jennifer said that I had "teacher face." I knew exactly what she meant: that look of exhaustion from grading an endless sea of student papers and poems. Last night's face was born out of the realization that I had 10 more papers to grade by morning.
Happy to say I woke up at 5 a.m. to finish the job. Teacher face should subside by the afternoon, I hope. Nothing a hot tea with lemon and sugar can't fix.
****
Feels like all parts of my life are in overdrive. Kids, teaching, Mass Poetry, my poetry--you name it, all are equally important. So I keep coming back to the idea that if everything is important, nothing is important. Sounds very nihilistic, doesn't it?
****
On the poetry front, I have been writing lots of drafts and lines waiting to for some attention. Need to find a solid block of time to convert my chicken scratch into poetry. A girl can dream.
****
I have new poems out at JMWW. Thanks to Ned Balbo for selecting my poems.
****
Last week, I went to a talk/poetry reading by Richard Hoffman at Endicott College. He said something that I've been carrying with me since the reading. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, that if you don't tell your own story, in the context of the larger world view, someone else will tell it--and you won't like their version. Meaning, if we don't write the stories of our lives, we'll be left out of history. We give history its context. So no matter how tired I've been the past few days, I think of that quote and begin to write.
I don't ever want to be out of anything. Ever. I keep on keepin' on!
Happy Tuesday, folks.
Comments