1) The last day of classes is Monday.

2) Of late, the writing of papers has gotten me into some silly situations – when you find yourself flipping through a Collected Poems and muttering all the last stanzas aloud to see if you can find hidden ballad meter, you may have gone too far. That’s not to say I’m not going to keep doing it.

3) Outside, it rains.

4) Fiction is all about quotation marks and how to display them. This becomes clearer the longer I have to teach it. I never would have thought they would be so problematic – but they are! You could spend the rest of your life puzzling over quotation marks.

5) I saw the moon move across clouds like ice-floes one night a few weeks ago, illuminating a small searchlight of a circle as it drifted (yes, I know, the clouds are moving, not the moon) after a graduate reading, and it occurred to me that, rather than attempting to capture the movement and the light of the moment in theatrical presentation, I now have to try to capture those things in words. The impulse is the same, but the method is different. If it is to be captured at all, of course. Delusional. The moon: observed in captivity.

6) Poetry is sometimes about taking out the words.

7) words