Spring Break 2010 (3)

The days have passed very quickly. Beautiful spring weather, each day a little warmer, each day a little closer to spring and here it will be spring official in a few days. A nice thing to think. Not sure why but this winter seemed to be a strange and hard one. To find myself wearing lighter clothes and not be annoyed at thinking I have to go outside for something is really pleasurable. I mean, just the thought of going outside makes me happy. Soon it will be warm enough for real stoop sitting and that will be something. Something cold to drink, a good book, and I can see many good days ahead.

And these past few days have been good. Most of it has been spent revising poems. I really get caught up in that world. Last night, I found it was three in the morning and I was still going at it, still thinking one line, one word, one image over the other. Should the words be reversed, repeated? How much paring was right and how much spare could lead to too spare? And then the opportunity to put back, to think that the undoing could be redone. The joy here is that nothing is really ever lost. The experience of taking away and putting back makes the put back different. And when it gets taken away (again) it isn't the same removal. These steps revising poetry aren't the same steps repeated but steps further walked.

So with two days left of spring break I'm not going to start counting up (yet) what I feel like I've accomplished but the reading has been good, the translating good, the new poems have potential and the revising is something for which I've found a rhythm.

And I've been listening to some good music over the time, from Miles Davis and Celia Cruz to Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Jerry Jeff Walker. Throw in Eddie Palmieri and Falla and you've got a nice coming into spring playlist.

My brackets for the NCAA basketball may have been busted. Won it all last year and may finish out of the money this time around. Went against the grain a few too many times. Not over yet, but I can read. Ah, baseball must be nearing.

long time passing

Okay, so it's been a long time since I've blogged but that doesn't mean that nothing is happening. In fact, the opposite of course. So much. Teaching: I really love the three classes I'm teaching this semester: Intermediate Poetry (new for me, and the students have done some wonderful writing, we've read Whitman, Pound, had student reports on Dickinson, Crane, Amy Lowell, tomorrow one on Eliot), Arts of Sport (again, a new one, which has allowed us to read some really good writing, Hunter Thompson, David Halberstam, Williams, Berrigan, Koch, Clampitt, Dean Young, William Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves, as well as watch the movie Glory Road; right now we're about to move from issues of race in sport to gender, which will culminate in seeing A League of Their Own, then on to case studies of various sports in the U.S.) and Spanish Surrealism (which it seems like I taught last semester but the number of students has gone from 27 to 38 and this changes how I have to think about it--tomorrow we look at the last of Poet in New York and then move on to Alberti's Sobre los Angeles).

And writing. Trying to get in four or five hours a week of poetry. Of translating. It's hard but worth the effort. The Hinojosa translations are out there (some). Go to tinhouse.com and the lost and found page and you'll see a little piece I did (which also appears in the magazine) but also has three translations. Waiting to hear back from a press on a proposal for the whole book. Cross your fingers.

Busy October:

Reading October 10 w/Pablo from Poet in New York at Teachers & Writers. Go to twc.org for more info.

Panel: October 16, ALTA convention (Minneapolis) on Poet in New York (chaired by Doug Unger)
Reading: October 17, ALTA Convention (Minneapolis) from Poet in New York 3-4.

Panel: October 29, UNLV on Poet in New York, 7:30 (check UNLV University Forum Series)
Reading: October 30, Las Vegas, from Poet in New York (will update).

November: Miami International Book Fair. Details forthcoming.

Okay, so that's the quick return to blog land. Jesse is cool, Katherine the greatest and Cannonball a woof.

Saludos y abrazos y l'shana tova.

Mark