Yesterday was brutally hot: 99 degrees in Portland, the highest temperature I can ever remember experiencing in Maine. Yet the gardens managed to look enticing, and they kept me wandering from shut window to shut window, as if I were Rapunzel's mother peering out into the witch's backyard.

Periodically I ventured into the oven--hanging clothes, filling the birdbath, watering flowerpots. I even carried my breakfast and lunch outside into the "shade." But the enjoyment was all visual. This is a nasty heatwave, of the sort that feels life-threatening, and I hate that Tom has to work in it.

Today should be marginally cooler, but the heat won't really break until tomorrow. Still, I hope to get out for an early walk before shutting myself up again with books and housework. I wrote a terrible poem draft yesterday, but maybe I will have better luck today. And I did force myself to send out a couple of submissions.

This time next week I will be on the downslide to the conference. I can hardly believe it's happening again, though year after year it does--that intense miracle week; that work. I feel like my body is holding its breath, waiting.

It's rose season in Maine, and the bushes are loaded this year. My neighbor's old rose, which may be almost a hundred years old, is always a heavy bloomer, but this year it's so massive that she's asked me to cut flowers as a way to keep them from overtaking her walkway and front steps. So now my vases are overflowing with roses, and the house is overflowing with fragrance.

At the moment all of the house windows are open to the cool air, but that will soon change. Temperatures are forecast to rocket into the mid-90s today, and I am going to have to be grateful for a/c. But for another hour or so I can allow the summer air to linger.

The animals are busy in this brief hiatus between night and heat. A raccoon moseys through the backyard and dumps over a flowerpot. A robin sings on a shed roof. A squirrel excavates among spindly pepper plants.

Yesterday I set my desk-self up at the outside table and spent a couple of hours on the phone with Teresa, combing through every aspect of our conference plans as neighbors' air conditioners dripped and spat, cardinals pewed, chipmunks skittered, and the fat white cat flopped dramatically in the grass at my feet. I suppose I'll be boxed up in the house today, which is too bad as I've been very much enjoying the al fresco life.

Oddly, while Teresa and I were talking, my phone kept pinging "email, email," and when I looked later I discovered that I'd received two journal acceptances--both for what I suspected might be unpublishable poems. One of the submissions is very long and very literary, a combination that is always hard to place. The other, a persona poem, features a young central Maine speaker who may or may not be considering abortion--a situation that does not automatically appeal to gatekeepers. As you know, I hardly submit anything these days, and when I do I tend to send to journals that are already familiar with my work. So I was surprised, and of course pleased, to learn that both of these weirdo pieces would enter the conversation, and both in places where my work does not typically appear.

Yesterday was hot, but still I kept the windows open, even overnight. I think today may also be tolerable, but the scorch is arriving tomorrow and eventually I'll have to break down and turn on the a/c.

T and I spent a lot of time in the yard this weekend--meals and cards at the outdoor tables, books in the chairs and the hammock, cooking at the fire pit. On Saturday night we walked to a Sea Dogs game (Mikey Romero: grand slam!); on Sunday I went for a walk with a friend and T went for a bike ride. But I didn't do a ton of garden work: mostly I just enjoyed hanging around among the plants and flowers.

But now we've returned to Monday. Upstairs T is creaking back and forth over the squeaky floor, chunking his dresser drawers shut, musing for a moment at the bedroom window. Outside a squirrel chatters and scolds.

First thing this morning I'll walk with another friend, and then Teresa and I will meet for our final conference planning session: we'll go through the schedule item by item, double-check every session syllabus, work out presentation and performance issues, make checklists of materials, fret about travel and timing and luggage. Naturally I'll have overlooked something and will start panicking. But that's always the way.

Meanwhile, Alcott House is cool and dim this morning . . . roses and yarrow glowing on the shadowed mantlepiece, fans hushed, birdsong pouring through the screens, air caressing my bare shoulders.

I have been writing a poem about war.

I've had something on my mind for the past day, which maybe doesn't need explication, but then again maybe it does.

This will be my second summer conference away from the Frost Place, yet for a variety of reasons--nearly all of them involving other people's privacy--I haven't talked directly on this blog about my reasons for leaving my position and the result of that departure on the conference and myself. I'm still not going to talk publicly about the minutiae of why I resigned, other than to say that I remain on cordial terms with past and current staff and was in fact invited last fall to bring the conference back to the Frost Place.

I worked for more than a decade as the director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching (and served for longer than that as associate director, visiting faculty, and participant in various programs). During Covid, I co-founded and directed the online Frost Place Studio Sessions, which allowed me to step more fully into the teaching of poetry rather than focusing primarily on the teaching of teachers. These were incredible opportunities. No other poetry program of such stature would have likely offered me these chances, given my lack of a master's degree and my quiet presence on any kind of national stage.

I will always cherish the Frost Place, always miss it. That said, over time my experiences there had come to resemble those of that well-known allegorical frog in boiling water. I was doing my jobs; I was doing other people's jobs; I was constantly smothering fires of one sort or another, and yet the conflagration would not be quenched. The situation was untenable, but still I kept at it because I couldn't imagine what my life would be without the Frost Place.

Finally, two summers ago, I had to face the truth. The conference was no longer a good fit for the Frost Place. With trepidation, I reached out to the administrators at Monson Arts with a proposal for a new version of my long-running program. And they welcomed me in.

***

This summer Monson Arts will host the second Conference on Poetry and Learning. The change in name--from teaching to learning--was deliberate. While the older version of the conference had been founded specifically for teachers, this one would work to draw in a larger variety of participants: teachers, yes, but also poets and other seekers who don't center their work in a classroom. Another major change was that suddenly Robert Frost was no longer our mage; this means that his work is no longer the centerpiece. Finally, Monson Arts is not a poetry center, as the Frost Place is. It's an arts center.

All of these shifts have allowed me to radically enhance the content of the program, even while retaining its familiar intimate, collegial character. In short, I have become a far better teacher since I moved the program to Monson.

The setting is very different from the Frost Place. But on every metric it is more comfortable: excellent on-campus housing, world-class food, a clean and inviting classroom space. For long-distance travelers, it's equivalently annoying to get to . . . but not more annoying. Instead of the White Mountains, we've got a gorgeous lake and the Hundred Mile Wilderness. 

A number of Frost Place alums have made the move to Monson with me. Yet I get the sense that a few are speaking as if the program no longer exists--as if its glory years are behind it; as if all we have are memories. This makes me sad because it's so completely untrue.

In fact, the move has energized me. It has also shown me what I wasn't able to do before: focus 100% of my attention on the well-being of the program, the participants, and our art. For this summer's session Teresa and I, along with our guest faculty, have constructed a free-wheeling, intense, interwoven schedule focusing on collaboration across artistic disciplines, across history, across selves. It's been enormously intellectually challenging . . . and thus entirely thrilling. I would not have had the time, the financial support, or the physical space to undertake such a project at the Frost Place. But Monson Arts has opened these doors for the conference.

This letter, too, is open, so if you know anyone who needs to read it, please share. I have been distressed, perhaps needlessly, about mistaken assumptions. The Conference on Poetry and Learning is thriving at Monson Arts. I welcome you to join us there.

Neighborhood stories: Let's start with this young man. On Thursday morning I looked up from my book and  he was staring through the living-room window at me. I know deer frequently travel through farther-flung neighborhoods, areas closer to the city's forest trail system, but no one in our more urban setting has ever seen a deer here before. Tom glimpsed him again that evening, but since then no more sightings. Let's hope he's found his way back to the woods.

And then there's Jack, the cat who lives across the street and who is my baby-sitting charge for the next few days. In a classic cat bribery scheme, he convinced the wind to suddenly blow open the back door I'd just walked through and instantly made his escape. Jack is a hardened outdoorsman so I wasn't too worried, and in fact he did return for recapture later that morning but, jeesh, cats. Today he won't find me so soft.

Jack is a well-known local eccentric. When I asked my next-door neighbor to keep me posted if she saw him, she rolled her eyes without worry: we all know that Jack will do whatever Jack wants. There's community comfort in our mild gossip about weirdos such as Jack, the world's nosiest civil servant, always prying into everyone else's business . . . but do not try to pet him. Nothing insults him more.

Meanwhile, the weather! What a day we had yesterday--soft swirling wind, bright sunshine, perfect temperatures. I decided to do no garden work but take a day to enjoy the space: sit among the flowers, wander my small pathways, lean back and stare up into the canopy, listen to birdsong. I wrote two poem drafts; I practiced the violin. It was a perfect day.

What's more, Jack's family gets a farmshare delivery once a week, which they couldn't use this time so asked if I'd like it. You know how slow my vegetable garden has been this spring, and I was thrilled. Unpacking the box was like getting a Christmas present in June: new potatoes, beets and beet greens, chard, kale, lemon balm, dill, lettuce, even a celeriac. Last night we ate marinated flank steak with baby herbed potatoes alongside roasted greens--a big plate of summer . . . windows open, neighborhood babies cooing, and on the radio the Yankees losing to the Orioles.

Yes, yes, you know I miss Harmony; you know central Maine is my homeland; you know all about my forever woods loneliness. But gosh: there are days when I am floored by this place where I so reluctantly ended up. Deering Center, land of tiny lush gardens and tree-shaded sidewalks; its staid domestic history--rows of close-set family houses, most built between the 1890s and the 1930s (with a few 1940s interlopers such as my own). In the summer evenings the air rings with the sounds of big kids playing foursquare in the streets, toddlers cackling in the yards. Neighbors actually lean over the fences to talk to one another. It is like living in a My Three Sons episode.

The house windows were open all night, and I woke to robin song--trill, burble, and question; trill, burble, and question; again and again and again.

It is a warm and humid dawn. I suppose we will have to lug the a/c out of the basement this weekend, though I so much prefer real air. But already the upstairs is muggy, and true hot weather hasn't even kicked in yet.

Thank goodness I went out to write last night. It felt really good to be with the poets, after my two-week absence, and now my notebook is peppered with useful scratchings and, just like that, my poem-making itch has returned.

I am full of eagerness. 

The little northern city by the sea is swaddled in a warm wet blanket of fog, and the birds are singing crazily, and summer is about to blossom. Today the climbing roses, loaded with buds, will explode into crimson glory. Today I'll open all of the windows and put on sandals for my walk to the dentist. Today I'll sit on the front stoop with a glass of ice tea and watch the neighborhood babies wave bare feet as their strong mothers shove strollers up the hill.

Yesterday I posted a new Poetry Kitchen class, "The Morality of Imagination: Writing into Other Lives," a two-day generative and revision session inspired by Shelley's "Defence of Poetry." Though registration's been live for less than 24 hours, the class is already half full, so you might want to sign up quickly if you're at all interested.

Meanwhile, I've been reading a couple of Le Carre novels I plucked from free piles and musing over how deeply sorrowful they are. I know I've said this before, but does anyone write better about loneliness? I am not a spy-thriller aficionado, but his writing moves me deeply. He is to his genre what McMurtry is to the western: a novelist who manipulates routine plot and style expectations in ways that draw the reader into a complex and painful relationship with character, landscape, history, and language.

Tonight, after a two-week hiatus, I hope to finally get back to my writing group. In the meantime, I've got the house to clean, and some desk work to handle, and that aforementioned dentist appointment to endure. And a summer day to love.