When all else fails, do it yourself

Just when I thought the difficult tasks were over, we've decided to attempt to sell our own condo. We're doing the buyowner thing, which will be great if it works, but expensive if it doesn't. (You can check out our place if you're curious.) Cleaning up this place was no small feat, but I think it looks great now, and hope we get some people to come look at it soon. The waiting game is not one I play well.

I turned in grades yesterday, which was sad because there is no potential teaching job on the horizon in Colorado. It is clearer and clearer to me every day that I love teaching, especially teaching beginning creative writing. Over the years, I have managed not to let the challenge overwhelm me, and now it's just plain exciting. I hope I can find something, even an adjunct position, in Colorado next year. We'll see.

I am officially working on my dissertation, mostly just thinking about it and what it might actually end up looking like. I'm thinking I will concentrate on these strange and columnar prose poems I've been working on here and string them together into a longer sequence. I really love how they seem to float and evaporate. Of course, inevitable, I will be asked the ever-stupifying question "What do the mean?", to which I will have to say, "I don't know. ..you tell me." Anyway, I'm writing the "prospectus" which is a bizarre document for a poet to conceptualize, and was characterized aptly by my friend Anna Marie yesterday as "something useful for a theoretical project but just wierd for a creative one." How do you pre-view your own poetic and creative project beyond ten feet in fromt of you? I'm a little perplexed and a lot stifled, but maybe it will prove to be valuable in the end, in nothing else to be able to talk about the collection.

I recieved my beautiful Briar Cliff review yesterday, in which my poem appears on the last page. I never know what to make of that. The grand finalie? A trifiling afterthought? I'm not complaining, especially because the magazine is just so stunning. And it's a poem about my mother, which is coming out just in time for mother's day. How swell.

I hope to be posting more now that the house is clean and we're on the market. Some new poems, if I can pull it off. Maybe even a series. We'll see.

I've been working with Scott Glassman again on another collaboration, this time as a participant in Dusie's chapbook collective project. Exciting stuff. So far, it's pretty intense and charged, but we're only about halfway done. . .