Slowly getting better. And I found out yesterday why I felt so sick when I got admitted to the hospital – pneumonia in both sides of the lungs, a little fluid in there, and pleurisy – and that it will take me about a month to feel all the way better. What’s weird is that only a day or so before the hospitalization I wasn’t even that sick – just the usual sinus and throat stuff. I was just getting excited about walking again after the foot breaking, and now this! It feels like I’ll never get back in shape. And I am definitely getting that pneumonia vaccine (I had one about ten years ago, but apparently asthmatics need one every five-to-ten) when I’m better.

But, I did have two acceptances to cheer me up a little – The Cincinnati Review and The L.A. Review, both really beautiful magazines I’ve admired quite a bit. Both poems from the newest manuscript, too. I’m hoping it finds a home soon. I’m polishing it up on every submission, just a bit.

The teaching has been a bit rough, what with being sick on top of the other usual stresses of teaching. I’m thankful the class is online, at least, so I don’t have to cough on anyone. We’re talking now about Seth Ambramson’s post about The Third Way, Stephen Burt’s essay on The New Thing in Poetry, The New Narrative, and I threw in Tony Hoagland’s essay on the “slippery poem of our time” – you know the one – on top of that. It’s challenging reading for graduate students, I think, but hopefully helpful to students who don’t quite know the lay of the land in the contemporary poetry world yet. I’d like to prepare them, realistically, for the world of editors and critics who have diverse likes and dislikes, to the fact that there are schools of poetry even if no one agrees what they are, exactly, right now, to the fact that there are poets trying to stretch the boundaries of poetry in every direction. I wish I had known about that stuff when I first started writing! It would have expanded my idea of what a poem can do and can be.