More than just another day

It's cloudy and cool outside, and the crows are noising big time.  I smell rain, and that will be just fine, as long as I get out to my car and retrieve my raincoat from the trunk first.  I slept hard last night, except for the usual trips to the bathroom.

I'm beginning to feel a little fatigue in my knees in the morning, but every day so far has been exhilarating.  I missed the first few minutes of a session on technology a couple of days ago, and when I got there, the instructions were coming at the speed of light and no handouts were given, and the technology is necessary for using Moodle, some kind of digital application for downloading and uploading files with MFA templates and my required writing.  So the administrative assistant for the MFA program will give me a tutorial at at 5 this PM.

Dorianne's craft lecture yesterday was a surprise.  She has found a constant in all the poets she has looked at, and she calls it the poetry of identity.  It's a poem from a poet's childhood in which the poet identifies himself as in the world, separate from the world, witnessing the world, and then writing about the world.  In a way, she claims it as a "universal," my term. So she advises all the poetry students to get in a quiet place and remember the earliest time possible when they saw themselves in the world, yet separate from an event that was going on.  So I tried it, and by god, it's so.  I have a clear and vivid memory--don't laugh--of my Uncle Glen throwing up in the petunias in front of grandma's house in Havensville, Kansas.  I can't have been more than 4 years old, but those flowers, my grandma's Paul Scarlett rose growing at the end of the porch, me standing on the sidewalk and him in the grass, waving me away and me not going but watching him bent over above the petunias as if he's intently looking for something.  I'm working on the poem with that narrative.

At the big people reading last night, one poet read a poem implicitly praising fathers, and another poet read a poem that demonstrated how far separate she is for hers and how little he understands her.  She said she promised her father she'd read a poem for him.  Hmmm.

I went to the student reading last night at 9.  The people in this residency are wonderfully friendly and supportive.  I don't know why that surprises me, but it does.  More later