Poetry Friday

Some days, I feel the universe smiles on me and says, "Yes, dear one, you ARE living the life you're meant to live."  Yesterday was one of those days.

It was a blessedly quiet morning in the office.  Fridays are often heavy-duty meeting days at my workplace, which means a Friday like yesterday, which has no meetings, seems even more calm and productive than a usual Friday, than a usual work day.  In the afternoon, I got some assessment work done.

I also got an e-mail from Diane Lockward who accepted one of my poems for the journal Adanna.  Hurrah!  She suggested some changes, which I think made the poem stronger.  No worries there.

And then it was time for our book club.  We usually meet for a brown bag lunch, but we decided to do something special this time.  Since it's National Poetry Month, we had been reading the collection of poems by one of our very own members (go here for your chance to win a copy of the book).  We decided to go off campus and enjoy food and friendship and a poetry discussion.  We decided to go a bit later, at 4.

What a great time we had!  We had some folks come along who, for various reasons, don't always make it to book club.  We talked about the poems, about the writing process, about whether or not the speakers and the characters in the poems were the author, about modern life in general.  We kept circling back to the poems; with some of our book club conversations, we don't stay on track like that (we wander away and never get back to discussing the book).  We had Middle Eastern food.  We had GREAT conversation.  It's what I always imagined grown up life would be like.

Then my friend and I went to an artist talk at the Girls' Club Gallery (which I've talked about here and here).  Kerry Phillips, the artist who made the installation piece out of small jars with crocheted bits and wooden spools and other things was giving an artist lecture.  It was fascinating and made me look at my odds and ends in a whole new way.  I'm beginning to think that everything looks like art if you put it in a shadowbox, and I intend to play with the idea of shadowboxes over Easter week-end--stay tuned.

Kerry Phillips talked about the "migratory habits of the junk drawer," a phrase which captivated my friend and me.  You know about those habits, how the stuff you use the most is in the front, while the less-used stuff migrates to the back.  If you need a writing prompt for this Saturday, here's one:  migratory habits of the _____.

I got home tired but happy.  Yet there was one more surprise:  Justin Evans' new collection Town for the Trees arrived in the mail.  What a beautiful book, both as an object itself (handmade! ivory paper!  perfect page weight!) and in the poems.  I'll be reviewing it in the next 12 days, and later, I'll be interviewing Justin. 

Yes, it was a great day, one of those days that, while long and tiring in some ways, filled up my inspiration well, one of those days that I struggle to remember on days that are bogged down in meetings and less inspiring events.