These Crazy Days

I haven't had much time for anything these past few weeks. L., my two-year-old has been needing a lot more time and attention now that we have another kid in the house, so I've been devoting as much time as I can with him. In the meantime, Western Washington University is finishing up the Spring 2010 quarter. One of the skills one acquires after performing in front of audiences for many years is the ability to gauge the interest of a room. My sense--my students are beat. They're done. So done.

And, I'm pretty tired as well. I'm ready to move on to the writing portion of my year. It'll certainly be a challenge working around the kids' schedule, etc.. Additionally, I'm teaching this summer to make up for lost income.

So, life's been far from boring in the de la Paz household.

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I like to go into the summer writing months with a project in mind. This year, I've got two projects I'd like to complete. The first project is the completion of my Camera/Dear Empire series. I see these two projects as linked. Both are prose poem sequences, so there won't be the difficult task of trying to integrate prose poems with lineated pieces (no, I don't really thinking linking the forms is difficult, I just don't want large imbalances in manuscript structure).The second project is a series of "Nocturne" poems which are turning out to be war and corruption poems. Political poems, but political poems with no grounding topic. No geography of witness. This is, I think, an issue going forward.

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I have no poems to give right now. I wish I did. Maybe soon.

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My front yard has been completely destroyed by an excavator and a dump truck. It's all, of course, intentional, but the place looks like a giant quarry. As I may have mentioned in the past, we had a fairly sizeable row of cedars, hemlock, and firs in front of our house. The problem with having huge trees near houses is obvious--every November we get strong winds which knock down trees. So we had to cut the big trees and we hired somebody to pull up the stumps. Now, without the trees we have drainage issues and large craters in the front. So we're paying somebody to raise and level the grade of the land so that we can grow a lawn for the boys and so that we can do a bit of gardening. It'll look great, but right now, it looks like a sink hole.

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Current spin:

Dragonette. "Easy." Why this song? Because they're Canadian and we can only get Canadian top 40 by our house. I kinda like it. It's catchy, y'know.