Poetry — with integral bra support

I am on a lot of mailing lists: pleas for support from organizations (poetry and otherwise) that have never given a dime or a minute's worth of support to me, credit card come-ons, political organizations, and many, many catalogs. I used to get three or four catalogs a week; now I get three or four a day. Yesterday, I got one called Poetry. Is it an academic program, a summer conference, a new magazine--experimental, conventional, or slam? No, it's a clothing catalog — for women of a certain age, I infer, like yours truly. It's a UK company, and not bad stuff, some of it, with wearable clothes, mostly. But Poetry? What is up with that? Some marketing genius wake up in the middle of the night with this brainstorm? I can't decide if I'm offended, amused, or just dumbfounded. Geesh!

Meantime, in real life, things go from crisis to crisis, as things do. I am swimming, not drowning, at the moment, although it was hard to tell here for a while -- coming up for air, now that the teaching semester is ending (one more class!) and getting ready to jump into the pool for the duration. What I mean is, I've been offered a permanent full-time position (technical writing). Since July 2005, I've been contracting, and except when there's no work, too much work, mixed signals from addled supervisors, or other problems, I liked it. I'm looking out the window of my office now at the Japanese maple, the lavender, the iris, the rose bush in full bloom. I'm going to miss this! I'm going to have to work on site for this new position, and it's a nasty commute to boot. And yet, with John self-employed and no other benefits, it seems to make sense. I like the work and the people at this new job, and can honestly do with less stress. So there it is, I am -- or will be -- a worker bee once again.

Will I write, will I read, will I be able to be part of the poetry (writing, not wearing) community? I hope so. I know that the past six months I've scarcely had the available brain power to read through a poem, let alone write one. So I'm thinking this may be an improvement, or the way to go, for the moment.