Hello Lovelies,

It’s a fine Spring shaping up here in Seattle: tulips dropping their opulent heads, the cherries flowering and falling, the light stretching long across the afternoons and into evening. What a time.

Here are some updates:

I’m working on a new essay about the SAT test. It will likely come out in the next couple of weeks (I’ll send word when it hits). The editor has been extremely thorough <– which I like; too few are these days. But for right now, I can’t seem to stick the landing. I have two alternate endings, both of which I like but which don’t make any sense together. What to do? We’ve been going back and forth deciding what to keep and what to cut. In any case, I’m eager to share it with you all when I untie this Gordian knot.

Actually, I’m in a similar bind re: poems. There’s a new one I’m working on called “Eclogue,” which I think is just dynamite, but I can’t figure the closing couplet. I’ve been trying for about seven months now and nothing I write is quite perfect for the tone and shape of the poem. I’d like to include it in the next book, but not before it’s right. I’ll keep polishing away and see if the answer doesn’t emerge, genie-like, from the lamp.

Meanwhile, I’ve been tinkering with my website. It doesn’t look a whole lot different (I’ve added some quotes from my book’s generous reviewers), but I’ve been teaching myself JSON-LD for SEO to make the thing more navigable for the bots, to what effect who knows?

Reading

• Adorno’s lectures on Aesthetics (Polity Books)
• I’ve just finished Sally Wen Mao’s poems, which were musically impressive, but which I can’t recommend unless one is very interest in resentment and/or the objectification of women. I am put in mind of Jack Gilbert’s excellent line from A Brief for the Defense, which reads, “To make injustice the only/ measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
• This essay from a newsletter I subscribe to is the best thing I read about Easter this year.

Listening

This weird art installation/music project that bills itself as “progressive sacred music for cathedral,” based in Seattle, of course, called The Opiate Mass. Give it a listen.

Oddments

• I just saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Pacific Northwest Ballet and it was amazing: easily my new favorite Balanchine piece. It put me in mind of Crystal Pite’s Tempest Replica, which is the best thing I’ve seen, period.
• My new church has just started having service in its new building. You should visit, if you’re in the area; it’s so small and so wonderful.
• The author D.L. Mayfield is giving the annual Gates Reading at SPU this year, and by “this year,” I mean this Thursday.

Thanks for dropping by. You guys are great.