Weeks Go By

Weeks can go by without posting and it's strange because I've been writing every day. And there is a way in which writing in a journal is like blogging, except it's obviously more private. But it feels like once I've been writing, that is working on poems, on translations, essays what is the exact point of the other (the blog)? Public record? Private record? What is it that one wants other people to know? What is it one wants to not put out into the world? But then there is the fact that a lot of what goes into the writing will become public but not without revision (what's in the poems, etc.). And since for me that's a process that can take a six months to a year (before the poem is ready), what I'm writing in the moment is not going to appear at the same time. Ah, a great soup of knowing what one wants to say and when.

So the past weeks have seen me getting ready for the semester ahead, have seen work on Hinojosa translations, have seen poems revised. Thinking about the fall is becoming exciting and strange. I don't know if I feel ready to teach (unfinished work of the summer) and yet looking over my syllabi, a kind of excitement about what's to come. The strange qualities of the academic life, that it allows for different kinds of intensities--from teaching to writing, from the need to constantly be creative and thinking about every little thing anew to the need to think historically and contextually. A new kind of brave new world mixed with cold pastoral.

abrazos,

Mark