Another great Dylan song. I will take care of myself, be a bit selfish, and relax tonight and tomorrow. Leaving to Austin on Monday, and I am VERY relieved to be getting out of the Denver area for a while. Believe me, very much looking forward to being in Texas. I will be in a workshop with Marilyn Hacker with other Canto Mundo fellows on Tues. I believe. Very much looking forward to spending time with fellow Canto Mundistas as I am a bit stagnant. Maybe more than a bit stagnant. Blessed to be going to this thing, very blessed. Hoping to get motivated. I'm sure I will be motivated to write after this symposium.

Hospice came and evaluated my grandmother and her time is short, but she may just make it to 100. Know my mom will take this one hard.

Read some long essays about poetry and sentimentality and more which were interesting and I wonder how in the heck people have time to write such longish outcries about sentimentality. Of course, what is viewed as overly sentimental or "emotional" is outside of the realm of narrow aesthetics that some have. Same with narrative-- I'll never forget some famous poet telling me narrative is dead. Not sure what the gripe is with story-telling at this point in history. It seems there's plenty of room these days to write non-narrative non-linear poems. The fact is our stories are barely beginning to be told and then pow, the dominant view seems to be we want non-linear poems and we will refuse anything that makes sense.

Yet, I am beginning to think  a lot of magazines prefer narrative poems. Someone said I was a narrative poet, but the work I sent out recently was more of a discombobulated mess. And no one took it! No, that's not true, a few places did, but overall, I'm thinking many of the places I sent to want a story, something tangible, something meaningful. Actually one poem recently taken is highly narrative, and the others are non-linear. So maybe things are more balanced that they appear. Too much was sloppy, unpolished and unclear.

Someone wrote on facebook that the way to start an argument online is to state your opinion. How true!

Well, hope to relax and let go of things tonight and listen to some music.

I really like the animals, the group. Also I enjoy the critters around my new  place: foxes, rabbits, squirrels and Canadian geese.