Coursework: finished.
Reading for comps: barely started.
I'm not sure how I'm going to adequately prepare for my exams in September; I've a lot of reading to do for my Contemporary test, in particular. It's funny. You think you've been responsible in your reading habits, and then you're confronted by a list of 120 books/names that proves you've wasted a lot of time on what you want to get out of books, not what you're supposed to know to get a graduate degree. I've finished four books since getting back to town from the extended trip north, though. I need to keep this pace, but with summer teaching beginning on Thursday, I don't know how I will. Let's hope.
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I neglected to thank the editors at The Pinch and Nimrod for taking poems of mine. They've done great work putting the issues together. I had to wait a while for the latter, but it was well worth it. Congrats to my friend Keith for also having a poem in Nimrod. I hope it's the start of a trend to see our work in the same journals.
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I've been thinking a lot about poems that I want to find good homes. Right before M., A., and I left to visit family, I put together several dozen submissions. Reading Sexing the Cherry, I was struck by this passage, which perfectly defines the anxiety we feel as we wait for poems, stories, essays to get picked up:
"After that our task was much easier. Indeed I was sorry to see the love-sighs of young girls swept away. My companion, though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free."
- Jeanette Winterson
