Here's what being out of town half of last week got me: four stacks of essays. One I finished up this morning at school, the next one I got started on tonight at home. The other two will probably wait until this weekend. Oh, and actually there's a fifth set which will probably wait until next week. Sheesh. One of my colleagues said long ago, "We aren't teachers, we're pack mules."
Luckily, the stack I'm working on now is in-class essays, which don't get as much written commentary, as are those to come this weekend. But it's a net effect, a piling-up effect, after a while. Again, sheesh. It's a blessed thing that we don't have research expectations, because who has time for research teaching 27-32 credit hours a year?
That said, I plan to work on poems this Friday whilst my car is getting a once-over. No essays for me, no sir. I've been doing a lot better today and yesterday about containing my resentment over not having time to write--and I'm making me some gd time.
What I'm reading now: Letters to a Stranger, a reissued lone volume of poems by Thomas James, who killed himself in '74 not long after its release. Apparently his work is in "deep conversation" with Plath (so says the intro), and I can see it in places, but he has his own thang going on. He has a knack for pithiness, which I dig, but he also has this way of pulling out the most unusual but fresh comparisons--the familiar made strange, but fresh.
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