An Upsidedown Week
This was an unusually social workweek followed by a lonely weekend, the opposite of the usual pattern. Monday I worked with Melenie and there was nothing out of the ordinary in that. She inventoried a box for Michigan of papers I was ready to send of them, some old papers, some new. The University of Michigan bought my papers on an ongoing contract some years ago. Once a month we send off a box. I was also sending out new poems. I wrote three this week, revised some written over the past few weeks. Last Sunday I made strawberry preserves, which Woody particularly loves. Tuesday our old friend Charles Coe came to town for a reading at the library. When we ran Leapfrog Press, we published his first book, Picnic on the Moon. Since Lisa Graziano has taken it over, she just this spring published his second collection, All Sins Forgiven, poems about his parents. Charles is a fine reader. We published poets with much larger reputations than Charles but no poet who was more successful in print. Charles writes strong but accessible poems with a strong emotional core. He gives readings anyplace at all and each time he reads, people buy his books. He sold out his first printing with us and went into a second printing. Anyhow, we had supper together and then went to his reading. He had a decent sized audience, the second best audience the library has had this summer. The biggest one so far was the annual reading I do with the students in my juried intensive poetry workshop. We always overflow the room. It’s a popular event.I’m glad Charles had a good audience. Kathleen Spivack, a poet I have known for decades, was here reading from her new book about the Lowell/Sexton/Kumin/Plath circle. I had lunch with her Thursday to catch up on our lives for the last ten or so years. She spends part of every year in Paris where she teaches at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Polytechnique. I am not generally a “lady who lunches” but it’s often the only way to see friends passing through or to get some alone time with women friends who live here. Friday I had lunch with my friend Lois. Summer is such a hectic time for everyone here, and she has company most of the time from July 4th to Labor Day. So going out for lunch in the summer is one of the only ways we can really have a private conversation. Friday Woody left in the late morning to teach his humor workshop at Omega in Rhinebeck N.Y. I settled in for a quiet and lonely weekend with, fortunately,two books I wanted to read. I am a fan of Jeffrey Eugenides and wanted to read THE MARRIAGE PLOT. Both Woody and I suffer terribly from separation anxiety. I used to travel all the time, flying alone of course, but in the last few years, we do all our trips together. So we’ve become unaccustomed to being without the other. It has been unbearably hot, perhaps 10 degrees or so cooler here than Boston but still in the 90s and humid. I don’t enjoy the garden when it’s like this. Today, Sunday, it’s supposed to cool down a bit, but it hasn’t happened yet. Not enough to get excited about. The times of day I miss Woody most are when we get up and generally have coffee together, maybe exercise together. Then supper time, when we always eat together and chew over our day. Then the rest of the evening and night. During the day itself, I am always busy and generally unless we’re working outside together or taking a real Shabbat, he is at his office and I am in mine. But the beginning and the ending of the day and the night are times we are used to each other’s companionship and communication.