Today was the first day of department orientation for my writing program, and the first time I met the faculty and my cohort of first-year poets. It was very exciting to put names and faces to the email addresses I’ve been seeing for months.

I came home after the presentations, took an online language placement test, and fell into thinking about where my writing had started and where it is now. I read aloud my entire portfolio – the ten poems I used for grad school apps – just to hear and remember. I haven’t looked at them in months. Much of it is stuff I would change now, but there is something there I still like.

It’s nice to feel a sense of my own history with poetry, and feel that there is a trend for the better. It’s even nicer to think that I will be in an environment, for two years, where I can actively and publicly experiment with ideas that have mostly just been bouncing around my head.

There is something about hanging out with other writers all day long that makes me really language-high. The way everyone uses words seems so mellifluous, or deliberate, or dizzying. It’s not like people are dropping references all the time. It’s not like a Ginsberg poem. But it is like being in a play, a bit. To clarify, hanging with actors is like being in a play in terms of the drama; but hanging with writers is like being in a play in terms of the language.

I am at home and at something as close to complete peace as my life ever approximates.