Poetry Returns, If Only for a Moment

While I waited for Marc to finish a meeting at work yesterday (so we could go to the hospital), one of his co-workers lent me Richard Hugo's Selected Poems. I read the first two, and an amazing thing happened: I was brought right back into that amazing world of language... I was tingling from the turns of phrase, and after reading just two, picked up a pen and a pad and started drafting a poem--something I haven't done in months. It felt great. It might not be a good poem, or a good start to a poem, but it's something, which, other than making another human, is the most I've made in the past 6 months.

I'm also cleaning my office, so that I have a clean workspace at home, and came across the pile from AWP--books, mags, and tons of fliers for magazines and ms submission guidelines. I unpacked that pile two days before the bedrest began, and am just looking at it now. What treasures I've missed the past three months!