January 22, 2013

Poisoned by supermarket chicken salad last night, thus a notable session-- at what hour I didn’t look-- over the toilet bowl. Was achy and flu-ish when I rose, but the symptoms have been leaking away, so maybe I dodged that bullet again.

Opened school e-mail after three days to find it jammed and chocked with deadlines and requests and instructions, the only possible response to which is close the window and get on to something else. It is at that point only that I consider retirement. So much coming on so thick can’t be really efficient, and yet I’m not unerring in deleting the incidental and keeping the vital. Deleted or dealt with about half. Will wait for the sun to rise for the rest.

Amazon sends me $20.60 as royalty on the sale of Blood Rose.

The weekend was actually quite excellent. Some work at school that I had to skip church for, missing the annual “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Long, good session at the studio, having discovered how to salvage works that I liked but couldn’t bring to fruition. Pencils, oil pastel, oil, pastels, a multi-media whirlwind. Sat in the café and read Edward Davison, my new fixation. He’s quite good, but also what one would call, with a little smirk, traditional. Yeats was still writing when he began, and Pound, and the great Moderns. Davison advances, but in a different way. He climbs higher on familiar ground. He never fully leaves the Cambridge quadrangles, but Oh! what he finds there! He reminds me of my long crush Millay, though she, though traditional, seems more modern. He focuses observations and expresses complicated feelings with masterful technique. Somehow in the history of poetry, that became insufficient. I’m exploring the whys and whens of that. Also wrote a little, mostly of the crushingly handsome man who sat himself opposite so I could look without appearing very much to look. I wrote a serious sonnet, but also a couple of playful couplets:

“A Spanish prince!” outcried my sudden fever,
and not one of those gruesome Hapsburgs, either.

...

Forgive my glancing every half a minute,
but my heart has Cupid’s arrow in it.


Opening Cantaria rehearsal not bad, not good–but good enough. Most everybody back.  Drinks afterwards, and a cosmo that tasted like a vodka sno-cone.

Coveting whatever bushes my neighbor across the fence has that cause the towhees to live there.