Catching up slowly

I believe the Columbus weekend workshop for 11 returning poets from my previous six years of giving the June juried intensive poetry workshop went well. I covered structuring various types of readings, organizing and publishing chapbooks and regular books with spines. We had half hour individual conferences on the mss. they sent me.   One workshop session we workshopped two poems from each poet and the whole groups retitled poems with bad or no title for each poet after I gave a short lecture on titles – good titiles seemed an almost universal problem. We had a public reading at the library. This was when we were getting two inches plus from Mathew and relatively high winds. it was also the night of the second debate and was supposed to be the third night of the baseball playoffs, although that game ended up being suspended till the next night. I was not expecting many people, but we filled the large room at the library with a wonderful audience. Monday evening we had a party for the poets and that was fun. But the whole thing was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting. The next day, both Woody and I were wrecks. We could hardly move. The house was a mess. There were bags and bags of bottles and cans and paper goods to pick up and take to the dump. Dishes to be done and put away. The diningroom to be put back to its normal state – leaf out of table, chairs returned to various other rooms, etc. Also having spent the last month reading mss. and annotating them, then the past two weeks preparing new lectures and examples for the subjects I had promised to cover, everything else I would normally do in the fall had been postponed. I hadn’t put away shorts, tank tops, sundresses, sandals; nor had I brought out transitional clothes. No sweaters, no corduroy or heavier cotton pants, no dresses suitable for 50 or 45 degree evenings, no tights. I am still five days later moving clothes around. As I bring clothes out, if I know I didn’t wear them in the cooler part of the year, I try them on to find out why. I must have already put at least seven pieces of clothing downstairs, the stained or frayed ones to go to Goodwill to be shredded and the best ones to go to the local thriftshop that supports the Outer Cape Health Services. Yesterday we didn’t work on any catch-up as friends from the Bay Area of Caifornia were visiting. Mary Mackey I’ve known for at least 40 years, a fine poet and novelist. Her husband Angus, we’d met only once before when we were in Sacramento, but we liked him very much. We had a wonderful time but once again are behind and tired. My office is still mostly a mess. We have started planting the bulbs that came but there are many more to go. We’re hoping to get to that today. Since it’s Oyster Fest weekend, we’ll hole up here except for this evening when Martha and Mae are having a party. If we’re not too exhausted, we’ll go. I promised to make an hors d’ouvres. Mingus of course enjoyed the party and the guests. As soon as he hears women’s voices, he comes running. He really likes women. He is friendly to male visitors but really wants attention from women. Schwartzie made himself available to be fussed over with both sets of guests. Willow hid, as usual. Xena avoided the noisy party but graced Mary and Angus with her large and dignified presence.