September 7, 2012

Birthday dinner at J and L’s, very sweet, a select group and cooked-just-right kabobs on the grill.

I don’t want to say that recent days have been blank slates, but they have been slates upon which there was not much will or opportunity to write. Classes are good, my students’ writing and participation outstanding. But I come home between and afterwards and sleep. I had underestimated the severity of the depression I entered in Sligo I think I am just now climbing out of it.

It is an odd green outside, the green world crushed under the gray silk of an enduring fog.

Looked carefully at the poetry of the poet whom nearly everybody cites as their favorite, who is quoted almost every time a contemporary poet is quoted. I read her poems with my lips tight, wondering what the attraction is, finding them not quite drab, but uninspired, ordinary, even a trifle borrowed. Perhaps that is exactly their attraction, drabness, lack of inspiration, extreme familiarity. Safety from the rigors of discovery. I picture a housewife strolling into her backyard and remarking, as if the world were just now belatedly revealed, on the niceness of everything. Her daughter is pulling a buttercup. Her neighbor makes excellent pies. A bird sings. She herself is so filled with love and understanding. She embraces the whole half block she can see from her patio. It is not nice to call other people names. Not that any of this is bad, but that it should be handwritten on pink paper and folded into her husband’s lunch bag for a sweet noon surprise. It should not pass as the voice of the age.