Patching things up with poetry

It's been months since I've made a post. This indicates that:

a) I am too busy.
b) poetry has been drifting out of my life, or I've been drifting out of its life.

Tonight I tried to break up the incessant work (teaching = working 10-15 hours a day) and patch things up with poetry by going to a poetry meeting at the local library. We were discussing poems by Theodore Roethke, and while the discussion skimmed the surfaces of the poems and didn't crack things open as much as discussions in college and graduate school did, it was nice to simply read and talk about the poems.

It was also interesting to meet an eclectic group of people: the junior in high school with dangly silver earrings, black boots, and shy eyes; the man whose father worked on "The Jazz Singer" and who reminded me of my late grandfather; the elderly woman with the Irish lilt; the balding men with office jobs and wedding rings.

Meanwhile, I bought myself a copy of Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-box, the uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments of Elizabeth Bishop, and I've started jotting down the odd phrase or two again. It's a start.