Well, I’ve got 26 minutes. Let’s see what I can accomplish.
WordPress is being a little tetchy this morning, elsewise I might have subjected you to a political harangue that the world is clearly better off without. Suffice it to say that I wish I was teaching Intermediate Composition right now–you can’t tickle the keyboard these days without turning up some appallingly awful rhetoric.
The weekend went reasonably well, though I didn’t make it quite so far as I’d hoped in my short-term plans. I revised and submitted “The Third Mercy” for publication, wrote a piece of flash fiction for a contest, and completed my reading and planning for the coming week (no mean feat, since it involved plowing through Mill, Tennyson, and Dickens, writing an exam, and condensing Victorian aesthetics down into a dandy ten-item handlist). The summer semester is breezing by pleasantly enough, though I’d like to feel I was getting a little more done in the writing department.
I am, however, getting excited about the prospect of the return to poetry when the six-week session is over. I’ll be managing a three-way balance for the rest of the summer–I have to compile my annual reappointment materials and churn through some research for an essay on Charlotte Smith in addition to preparing some verse for submission in September–but I feel as though my mind is fairly well-stocked with lines, ideas, and plans for the work. Reading Victorian poetry has nudged me in some new directions (I spent last night reading and rereading and re-rereading “The Lotos-Eaters”), and that experience has been nicely complemented by Carl Dennis’ Unknown Friends, which I’ve been sipping and nibbling for the past week.
I’m going to devote a longer post to Dennis somewhere down the road, as his work has profoundly informed the direction my own writing has lately taken. (Don’t blame him alone: when I was at Auburn I spent pretty much the entire year reading my way through the Carnegie Mellon poetry series; I’m in their debt as well.) Today, however, that’s just about all 26 minutes will buy you.
