week seven

It's either a mistake to meet with the poetry students and the literature students in the same two weeks as meeting with advisees for pre-enrollment, or it's inevitable. I've blamed myself in the past for poor scheduling, but I see now, even if I spread appointments over a three week period--and this in a ten week term--it's impossible to avoid this crunch and still see them when it's most pressing for them. The poetry students are revising work for final portfolios. The literature students turned in essays at the end of week five (any sooner and they'd have had very little to write about--most wrote about Blake as it is), so are now looking at revision work and topics for the final paper. And pre-enrollment takes place weeks six and seven. Every 20 minute appointment slot I opened on my calendar last week filled, and it's the same today. And I opened every 20 minute slot I had.

Which is to say, if I owe you an email and you hoped to hear from me this weekend, apologies. I kept to myself this weekend. Meeting with students is good work, but it crowds my head with the sound of my own voice--just as email does--and I am tired indeed of the sound of my own voice.

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Meanwhile I've got a poem going nowhere tapping me on the back. The most bothersome kind of poem, the one going nowhere.

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I will write to you though. Though if you're a phone sort, pick up the phone.

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postcard: Knox College

Please join us today, May 1, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room of Old Main. Writers' Forum will feature BJ Hollars & Nina Sajeske, each reading from their fiction.

On Thursday, May 4, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room, Old Main, essayist and fiction writer Sara Levine will be giving a reading and talk entitled "On Liking Littleness: Essays the Size of Handkerchiefs, Novels the Length of Nosebleeds, Conclusions Detached from Tedious Arguments." Levine will also be announcing this year's Davenport fiction prizes. See you there.

And do please join us on Friday, May 5, at 4 o'clock in the Muelder Room, Seymour Library, for a Caxton Club reading featuring author M. T. Anderson.

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from the Annunciation notebook, Ithaca, NY, May 1, 2003 7:45 a.m.

A Thursday morning. Predicted: rain, thunderstorms. And just minutes ago I looked out the window to make certain there was no sun to miss. Nope. No sun. By the time I'd blown off my 7:20 appointment with the sun--because there is no sun--the sun came streaming in my window and I had again missed my window of light. Well, not entirely. Just now it creeps up out of reach, over my roof. The clouds take it too; in and out it fades, shines. This is a joy in my day, this appointment with light. The east facing window in my living room is a Dial. All year it measures the light as it creeps past the treeline & the house next door. Over time spent living in the light in these rooms, watching for it, remembering its seasons, I know this house through its light. The light that comes through the east window at 7:20 a.m. in the spring sleeps late in winter, or makes no effort to show. Still, the house I know (and will leave with sadness at the end of this summer)--the rooms and their windows--takes its daily place in the sky just as the sun takes its daily place in the house.

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Gratitude, always.

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