Hide

Well my friends its Friday and do I need to go work and teach people how to make beautiful art or not so beautiful art as the case may be? No the answer is no—there will be no brushes used in this house for the next three weeks unless it is for entertainment purposes.

Yesterday I received an email from someone I did not know saying how much he enjoyed my recent poem in Pleiades which would be great if I had actually received my own copy. As politically incorrect as this sounds, I feel like a blind girl going out of the house naked. Damn it, why can’t I read the poem? I mean yes, I wrote it but that was like three years ago and now I am naked and blind and writing nothing.

Also in the box, a letter from the director of Palm Beach workshop (could I possibly milk this workshop any further?) asking me to send a copy of my poem “Hide” which I read at the reading because someone from Sydney Australia wants to read it at their poetry festival and they don’t seem to be able to find a book by Teresa Ballard. I am going to have to get Teresa Ballard has no book T-shirts.

Anyway I have decided to make a copy of all these letters and send them to Louise with my next Yale submission and tell her it is all her damn fault. If she would just pick me next year we would all be satisfied and she would break her lifetime streak of never picking a woman. Not that I am bitter.

So the question for the day is how far have you ridden a poem because I think I might have to go out and shoot this one after it gets back from Australia? And is there one poem in your work that people keep coming back to?

These are the things I want to know, while I finish my pile of The New Yorker which has grown by bed.