Poet Tree

Monday is fast becoming my favorite weekday because it is the weekday that I do not go to work. Since I am not teaching now my days off can truly be days off, not days that I plan lessons and grade. I am slowly regaining a weekday routine that involves writing. On Mondays I have the luxury (or torture, depending on how you look at it) of being able to sit at the computer for as long as I want.

Writing is going... okay. I have about three beginnings going and I realized today that one of them is probably going to go somewhere; the other two, probably not. This is par for the course of writing poetry, which I realize when I go back through my old files. I have many more stalled poems than finished ones. It's sad because of course I think all my ideas are fabulous when I start them. (Otherwise how would I have the energy to get them going?) Sometimes I go back and mess with old beginnings to see what will happen. Every now and then I am able to use something old in a new way, but a lot of the old stuff is just bad. In a way realizing this is freeing. It makes it less scary to write new bad stuff.

Today I went on a field trip to the library to look for the next book Liz and I are going to read in our online book club. (It's currently a small, two-member club, but watch your mailbox--you might get an invitation to join soon.) Liz is very inspirational to me because she is a mother and a teacher and a teacher and she apparently reads about 17 books a week. Our first book was As I Lay Dying. For the second we thought we'd do something lighter: I was looking for Confessions of a Shopaholic. It should be an easy book to find, and the library's online catalogue said that it had 3 copies. I went and could not find a single one.

So I wandered through the library, one of my all-time favorite activities. I love libraries. The downtown DC public library is three floors, a variety of rooms filled with oddly-organized collections of books and an interesting collection of people as well: secretaries on lunch breaks, kids, the homeless. It's a busy, bustling library. It smells like mildew, air conditioning, unwashed skin, and paper, but oddly, the scent seems to fit and does not disgust me, even in my pregnant state.

What's great about the library is that it just has so many books! Of course that seems obvious, but I really like just wandering through the stacks and seeing what I come across. Today I looked in the poetry section and found a sweet little book of poetry by Ted Kooser called Valentines. One year, Kooser wrote a valentine poem and sent it to a woman he knew; each year after that he wrote another and sent it out to more and more women, until he was sending it to thousands of women and it got too expensive to mail them all so he quit. The last one was just given to a single woman, his wife (who, according to the note at the beginning of the book, "didn't seem to mind" that he was sending his valentine poems to so many other women, including his friends' wives, for years). Describing the book makes it seem creepy, but really it's a nice book. The poems are not really love poems but are fitting for Valentines Day. Reading it gave me some ideas for a new poem (which is going to be GREAT, of course).

Then I looked in the cookbook section. I wanted to find very old cookbook to help with another idea for a poem that I have. I didn't really find what I was looking for, but it was fun just to browse. There are so many interesting books in the world. I came across The Food Lover's Book of Days. What a great idea for a book. (Hmm.. or a poem...)

It's a relief just to have more ideas. All spring, I had only two ideas and wrote one poem. I think that tomorrow I am going to go to the Library of Congress Folklife Collection and see what I can find in the way of old cookbooks.