On Thursday afternoon of last week I thought I’d organized all my obstreperous administrative ducklings into a row and marched them off into a soft-focus sunset. Or, if that metaphor isn’t working for you, you could say I was heading into Washington and Lee’s weeklong break with a clear desk and a nearly-empty email box, ready to produce a stellar grant application for the NEH Public Scholar Program (due 3/3, yikes) and prepare to give a talk and a reading at Roanoke College on 3/24 and get my final revisions of my poetry manuscript to my publisher and relax and read several books and, oh yeah, maybe do a little work on current writing projects.
Well, THAT was foolishness. A minor bomb dropped on Friday at noon, and since these bombs often have my name painted on the side like I’m Wile E. Coyote or something, here I am shifting personnel around again on my mental chessboard, spending hours reorganizing our course offerings and conferring with colleagues. In the face of unanticipated bureaucratic responsibilities, triage: of all the NON-department-head work I meant to do this week, what’s the most important?
The rational answer is the grant, since that deadline is the soonest and its success would have the biggest potential impact on my life. I’m working on it. But I’ve also slept in some and read aloud excruciatingly funny passages to my son from Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, a book Deborah Miranda gave me last fall and which I found again this past Sunday under a pile of papers. Both kids have been home due to school closures and now, for Cam, a bad head cold. Lawson’s memoir is hard to read aloud, because you start weeping with laughter and can’t see the pages, but this almost-futile exercise still goes on my important list. I’m hyper-aware that our family will change when Madeleine goes off to college next September, so I find myself treasuring non-productive interactions with my kids, like our rambling dinner discussions about presidential politics and time travel.
Teaching feels important too, but breaks from it are helpful. Poems and essays have been harder to believe in, and therefore to heave into being. I’m rarely as poetically productive in the winter as in other seasons—maybe my muse is a hibernating bear—but I’ve had a particularly intense existential despair about it in the past few weeks. You know, the usual poet thing: what’s the point of striving at an art so few people want to read? I’ve gotten over such fits of reasonable bleakness before, so I presume I will again. I tell myself the despair is triggered by bad weather, or steroid withdrawal (the sciatica is finally somewhat better), or exhaustion at the prospect of promoting another book later in the year. At any rate, poetry has always wandered back, so I don’t really fear it’s abandoned me forever. And as I reread the Radioland manuscript, too, while I do keep finding improvements to make, I also think: you know, this is good work. I can help it find its way in the world.
While I ponder my menagerie of ducklings and bears, here is a guest blog on some other important stuff for the Tahoma Literary Review. It refers to a poem, “Sticky,” in their current issue. You can download a free electronic copy of the issue here (or order the print version). Thank you, kind and supportive editors of the world. Now this coyote, super genius grant candidate, has to make like a roadrunner after the fellowships, dodging work-missiles along the way: wish her luck.
