My Babies

So, by 5pm today I will have the entire first batch of poems from my students (some are emailing them to me b/c we lost a day with Labor Day). Some have emailed earlier and I don't know why, but poems always seem to make me a little giddy. Though Honi Jeffers writes "a child cannot be like a poem" I somethimes think a poem is like a child---there you are sending it out into the world, perhaps you want it to fly to a major press, though as I tell my students, it is the flight, the process that matters, not the product, nor the destination.

Today I'm going to enjoy a whole day of process---no teaching, no bar. Just me, the gym, the record store, cleaning the apartment, the laundry, the post office (I'm sending some poems toward the Heartland) and 33 new poems by 33 amazing younger poets.