Moving into a New Phase/Poetry Reading/Bucket List

It's getting greener every day here, and a couple mornings ago we had not one, not two, but three moose in our yard! Unfortunately I couldn't get them all in a single shot, but it was cool to see.

Poetry Performance

Since my previous post, I performed in this event: 

--last night, I shared two poems with "bird" themes as part of this event, itself a part of the annual Shorebird Festival here in town, the subject of that newspaper article a couple weeks ago. I was sorry not to have had time to memorize my poems, but another thing I did since my last post was turn in grades, so I'm now officially done teaching for the term! I did have the poems mostly from memory, and was in eye contact with the audience, as I prefer to be, for the majority of the time. It was a wonderful event, with some great music and many beloved local poets sharing.


We saw some sandhill cranes on a back road recently. They are so...arresting.

yes, still plenty of snow higher up

Plans and Writing

Since last posting, I've also finally made my bucket list--actually written down all the things I'd been hoping to get done when the semester was over! 

Lots of room to add more details!

Writing is top of the list, followed by reading, followed by outdoor things. Of course, I never stopped either writing or reading, but I'm so happy I'll have more time to attend to those drafts that are crying out to me like babies. I think it was admirable restraint that I didn't put "cleaning" and "taxes" top of the list--those are things I really haven't gotten to that have really bugged me! Soon...


I've also had a wonderful conversation with my mentor, soon-no-longer-to-be-my-mentor, about which authors I might want to be reading for the months until the MFA residency in August. It feels great to have the promise of some structure as I continue to develop as a writer.

Food

I've been enjoying nettles every day, including in puddings like this, made with the immersion blender from unsweetened almond milk, warrior protein powder, xanthan gum to make it puddingy, and stevia.

As you can see, the immersion blender doesn't completely pulverize the greens, and I like that there's still texture to chew on. I imagine it's sort of like oatmeal, but way healthier.


Since we're talking about food, a quick revisit of my talk about increasing calories last time. I appreciate the comments and responses; I even appreciate the caring puzzlement elicited. I don't have many more answers yet. except for one thing I need to give up!


Yes, it must be so old by now, but now that the pressure's off, I really have no excuse not to give up caffeine, as I should have weeks and months ago. The first thing that has to go is the chocolate, which I notice I'd posted about giving up over six weeks ago. I've been eating the odd tiny piece of very dark chocolate every few days, and putting cacao in my smoothies regularly, because it's one of the few things that's appealing to me. However, even aside from the caffeine/theobromine synergy exacerbating the negative effects of caffeine on my systems, the cacao has started to cause the uncomfortable irritation effects that it always has on me eventually--this time around, I was hoping it wouldn't happen, but it has. Not worth the pain! So, no more cacao or chocolate. Still bargaining for my autonomy, so I'd better find something to replace its calories in my intake. 


As for the caffeine pills and caffeinated tea, to be honest, I've been relying on them just to stay awake through the day this past month. They haven't even been impacting my sleep as much as they ordinarily do. But now things have mellowed, and I don't absolutely need to stay awake all day! I'm dreading the withdrawal--just six hours of sleep is leaving me with crushing headaches--so I'd love any advice on how to get through that. I'm thinking a gentle taper would be the smartest thing to do.


Excited to get out more, excited that the only work-work I have now is editing and translating, both of which I love, excited to catch up on rest and friends!

Directions--Translating the Dictionary Into Poems, Consistency, and About that Cake

Often, after I write something, its cadences and sentences will run through my head for some time. I lie awake at night tinkering with lines of poems and making sure my changes are committed to memory so I can write them down in the morning. After publishing a blog post, I often go back and add a sentence here, adjust a sentence there, several times over. This time, I realized that my "Goals and Intentions" post of yesterday left enough things unspecific to merit another post. The spirit of my goal for 2011 putting in an appearance, perhaps: the spirit of paying attention, revising, reviewing.

I'm not about to give up paying attention, revising, reviewing because it's 2012! And that's the major point I feel I need to make: my goals, both in the rest of life and on the blog, are for more, better, deeper of the same general directions rather than branching off into something surprising and new.

James Altucher's blog today has a wonderful graphic illustrating the concept of "focus." Seriously, check it out: I'm a non-visual person and even I was struck by it! All these psychedelic circles appear to be in constant motion, until you focus on the black point at the center, at which point, all becomes still.
I take this not as a message simply to tune out the black dots, but in fact, to find ways to integrate the distractions into the points of focus, perhaps even use them as bridges to connect the dots. For example, in some ways, teaching Linguistics 101 feels like something of a distraction in my goal of becoming the best writer I can be. But on the other hand, as I spend all this time preparing the course, I find myself constantly using examples from poetry, or thinking how a topic in theoretical Linguistics is interesting from the poetic standpoint. I'm going to need to get better and better at written communication, since it's a web-based course, and at "knowing my audience" and giving them what they need. In that way, the moving circles are centered around the "point" and contribute to it.

Similarly, for one of my other jobs, I translate dictionary entries from Italian into English, referring to Ancient Greek. I adore this job. I adore it because it has me working right there in the guts of language, and also constantly dipping into fragments of Greek Literature for examples. I want to do more in my own poetry in terms of bringing in themes from Classical Literature, and I'm endlessly fascinated by words. So, another "interconnection between points" is that one of the first poem drafts I've been working on is a meditation on the concept of "equal" (a very complex adjective I translated a while back) interwoven with the story of Sisyphus. I don't even have a complete first draft yet, but it's one of those that keeps me awake at night.

I do best when I don't lie awake all night, though, and I think I blew off the "consistency" concept a bit last time. I do have some resistance to it, and mostly because I'm afraid of losing my crazed flair or something, but even if my sole motivation is being a better writer, I have to admit that I'm not much of a writer when I'm psychotic or suicidal, and that consistency in certain areas helps me to avoid spending too much time in either of those places.

And on the theme of continuity, as Mindy pointed out, my series posting "food as pleasure" has kind of fallen by the wayside, but is not totally forgotten. That cake I made on New Year's Eve was supposed to fall under that rubric, so I should say more about it in the near future too. A hint: zucchini!

I mentioned feeling less "connected" to food writing of late. It's partly because, although I was commissioned to make food several times last year, it's getting on for four years since I actually worked as a chef! How time passes!

But nonetheless, when I made my smoothie this lunchtime, I caught myself composing a post, or several, about how smoothies are so much more than the sum of their parts, how you can pretty much make a smoothie version of your favorite "anything," and other enthusiastic tidbits.

So, building on last year and aiming to do everything better, and to use the psychedelic circles to join the dots--that gives a fuller picture of what's to come. "A new day's never a blank page..."
How are you building on last year?