Spring Break 2010 (4)

One of those days when you think or know that winter really is over. Walking around Brooklyn, something warm and slightly achy in the air, the streets crowded with people, every people, and the sidewalks so full to get by takes patience and patience and everybody knows and nobody minds and folk are smiling, shyly, as they acknowledge that we, yes, are all just strolling (not striding, not hurrying) but strolling along together.

So revisions this early afternoon and they were good and lazy and then a long walk in Prospect Park with Christian McEwen who is in town for a few days and we criss-crossed and zagged, Cannonball pulled and pulling, and Long Meadow was so full it was hard to know where to walk so it was step here step there. And Christian and I just talked about the usual kinds of things, lives and poetry, selves and friends, the different kinds of nostalgia, the different kinds of hope. We talked about the book she's writing on slowness, a possible new book together on walking (hard to believe we did Alphabet of the Trees a decade ago). And it was fun to return home and sit at the table drinking iced tea after having walked and wonder what a book about walking would look like.

Then Christian left and I sort of worked. Revisions again but this time in early evening. Some reading over student work (the short day left until school starts again). Katherine came home from the studio. Jesse played music, wrote. Black beans and veal with lots of secrets for dinner. Then some writing, revision some more. NCAA Basketball on the tube with the sound off a good deal of the time. Another walk with Cannonball. More writing. Now this. And then to Melville and to bed. Not so bad a day at all.

Spring Break 2010 (2)

Two long days in a row of writing/revising. Work in particular on Hinojosa and today finished the bulk of the revisions. Monumental. Exhausting. I have about fifteen new poems from the last book (Sangre en la libertad) to work on/revise, and then I think the manuscript will be very close. I still need to do work on the introduction but that is also already forming in my head and I have some notes. Biggest problem with that will be how much to say about a major poet who is relatively unknown even in his own country and barely a blip on the English-speaking world radar.

Finished typing up poems from moleskine of 2009. They sit waiting for revision as well. Between those and the translating, reading Los detectives salvajes by Bolaño, some Melville, some Elizabeth Bishop, I am feeling very literary in the early spring break days.

I also have a lousy head cold. No surprise there, though. I always seem to get some kind of physical something at the start of any vacation.

But tomorrow is supposed to be sunny. Will try tonight catching up on sleep (have been staying up very late and rising very early, havoc on internal clock) and if the weather is right, may actually take a spin on the bike in the park. Imagine that. Maybe the winter is really about to end.