Residency ends soon. I am completely wiped out and will need a day or two to recuperate before I begin the essay. I’m 90% certain that the third poem I’ll add to the essay is Donald Justice’s “Psalm and Lament”– I just need to get home and re-read it. I could be very happy writing about Justice, though, very happy.

I leave this residency a much more confident reader. I still have a great way to go as a reader of poetry, but I feel right now like I have at least the basic tools to evaluate a poem and can have a good conversation with much better readers than myself. I still prefer to experience a poem with others, in a conversation, to reading it alone, if I am to make a strong critical judgment. But I’m getting better.

I am extraordinarily grateful to this faculty for their support. Several took time to help me individually, despite the fact that I am not their student. Everyone here comports themselves with such grace until such time as the real socializing begins. And by then, I too am ready to goof off some.

I see in everything how much my previous teachers have taught me, and hope that I make them proud when we are here together. I don’t think I did in the O’Hara bookshop– a class I enjoyed a great deal and learned a great deal from. O’Hara is the kind of slippery voice that I do not read well yet. Room to improve. Always room to improve. I think I will read Lunch Poems a fourth time this semester. The bookshop has given me new tools.

How can anyone bring themselves to leave before graduation? Do they not wish to revisit one more time what they are here for?

Anna Clark, I am thinking of you this afternoon.