• Write 52 new poems. How did I do? It’s possible, if I count all the jottings and rushed drafts that are clearly going nowhere, that I wrote 52 drafts in 2011, but I think the real count, still a bit generous, falls at 42.
• Submit to 20 journals. How did I do? I sent out fifteen packages last year.
• Attend a juried workshop. I didn’t attend a live workshop last year, but I workshopped twice on-line with Kim Addonizio and both workshops were amazing, challenging, and extraordinary helpful. I’m starting another eight week session with her on the ninth, and for anybody out there looking for an on-line poetry workshop that’s really going to kick your butt and be worth the money, Kim’s is it.
• I wanted a contest ready chapbook by September, and here I fell furthest from the goal. Not even close. In fact, now I have two half-way chapbooks instead of one finished one because half-way through the year I started writing a series of poems on a theme.
• Two blog posts a week. Also, no. I had 77 posts in 2011; twice a week would have been 104.
• Read 52 poetry collections. I read 32 books for the first time and re-read some old favorites.

And yet I feel like it was, on balance, a good year. I got a lot done, even if I didn’t reach my target numbers on, well, anything. I learned a lot, had some mild successes, and got better at what I do. It feels like a win.

Not having a chapbook together is starting to sting; it seems like that’s something I should have put together by now. Maybe the problem lies in not knowing how to put a collection together; perhaps I’m trying too hard to have everything relate to a theme; perhaps I’m simply not ready to be thinking about collections yet. I don’t know. The chapbook goal, that’s the wild card every year.

My goals for 2012 are essentially the same:

• Produce 52 decent drafts
• Continue to strive for a daily writing practice
• Post to my blog twice a week
• Enter poems in one contest
• Send out 20 packages
• Participate in two writing workshops, either live or on-line
• Finish the in progress chapbook (if only in terms of sheer number of poems). I’ll eliminate the requirement that it be “contest ready” but dang it, I want to finish this project at this point if only for the sake of finishing the project.
• Build relationships with other writers

Watching the Small Boy at hockey practice is one of my greater joys; I love to watch him give his honest best, to work so hard. I tell him, honestly, to just keep doing what he’s doing. If he continues to work as hard as he does now, improvement will come and he’ll be fine. He’ll surely be ready for the next age group up when he ages out of Bambinis if he keeps doing what he’s doing. He’s vastly better than he was in September, and he was making really rapid progress until he was side-lined by his concussion. Just keep doing what you’re doing, I tell him, and you’ll be fine. That’s the ultimate goal, to be as clear-eyed about my own progress as I can be about his, as I’m trying to teach him to be about his own self.

Whenever Small Boy has to play a team he’s lost to before, I tell him: “That game is over. Today is today. You play today’s game.” I think that’s going to be my motto for the year.

I also believe in making specific goals, goals with numbers and dates, whenever possible – I learned that from January’s poetry action plans. It’s easier to be accountable with numbers attached: did I write 52 poems or did I not? And making my goals public, here, also pushes me to accountability.

So here are my writing goals for 2011:

• write 52 new poems
• send out 20 submission packages
• attend a juried workshop, preferably this one
• have a contest-ready chapbook manuscript by 1 September (did I really just say that out loud?)
• write two blog posts a week
• read 52 poetry books in 2011

And just to make sure I keep my life bigger than my notebooks, I plan on continuing with my armchair bird watching (which Marge would say could only improve my poetry) and registering for a photography class.

I’d been starting to feel some creeping guilt about this upcoming trip, the kind of guilt that I’m sure some of you moms, especially fellow stay-at-home moms, will understand and perhaps find familiar. I’ll be away for twelve days (two of which are lost to trans-Atlantic travel) and I’ve been starting to think that’s rather a long time. I’ve been starting to think it’s a bit selfish. I’ve been starting to think it’s a lot of time and money for a poetry workshop. (It doesn’t help that the work I have chosen – or the work that has chosen me – holds no financial promise. I mean, even the Pulitzer Prize for poetry only awards ten grand. From a purely financial calculation, every poetry workshop I attend is a net loss – more so if R has to take vacation days so that I can get away.)  I’ve been starting to wonder if I actually deserve this all-about-me trip away from my family. Why do we do that? As women, generally, and mothers, specifically, our wants and needs end up on the low end of the totem pole more often than not.

So I started making this list/schedule for R, and it’s two pages long – and that only covers Monday through Friday! (Though I’ve put some effort into organizing things so that I don’t have to do routine house chores on the weekend.) And I’ve left off the intermittent stuff that he won’t need to deal with(recycling, washing the car, migrating boy toys back into more orderly storage) as well as the blindingly obvious stuff like “feed the children.” We let a lot of things slide around here (ironing, for example, and washing the windows), it’s part of our agreement, but apparently I still do a lot. Laundry alone takes up half the list. Grocery shopping. Picking Small Boy up from Kindi (R does the morning run), shuttling him to play-dates. Keeping the plants watered. Vacuuming. Heavens, do I vacuum. Now that we don’t have a cleaning lady, I’ve picked up the cleaning, too, and I try to stay on what was her schedule but one week out of four that probably gets lost in the shuffle. When I write down everything I do to keep this house more or less running, it runs to two pages – and here’s the scary thing: in spite of all that I do do, we don’t exactly run the tightest ship around here plus R’s chore list would probably go on for quite a bit as well. It’s exhausting, all the stupid stuff I do every day just to keep our heads above water. But seeing it listed out like that, I have to say: I’m feeling a lot less guilty about this trip. Seeing it listed out like that makes me realize that I have a full time job, and this is my two-week vacation.

Do you see yourself in this post? Do you feel a pang of “I don’t really deserve this” when you take time for yourself? It’s the time, I think, more than anything, we feel guilty about. I don’t have a problem buying things that I need (clothes, a new bike) or want (books), but when I carve out time for myself, when I get out of the house for the day (or twelve), there is a twinge of conscience. Is this ringing a bell with any of you? What do you do to push through the nagging voice and take what you need?

I’ll put together some coherent thoughts on this when I’m feeling more coherent.

By my reckoning I made a good year of it. I did not write fifty-two poems but I wrote forty-six things that I am able to call poems under my bizarre internal standards and I’ll take that. I wrote a lot of things that went nowhere, and I’ll take that too, and in the process I learned something about saving the two lines that seem worth saving and moving on and I’ll take that most of all. I sent out fifteen packages and in the end had eight poems published in five journals (with two submissions still pending): my novice self will very much take that, thank you. I subscribed to or requested sample copies of a few new journals, and though I’d love for it to be journals-a-palooza around here, the logistics of the back-and-forth communication about how much extra the journals cost when shipped overseas (because I know journals run on tight budgets and want to be sensitive to this point), and the growing on-line availability of back issues, made it easy for this one to slip by the wayside. I lost count of the poets I added to my collection and am too lazy to go to my studio shelves to figure it out. Suffice it to say I am better read now than I was one year ago. I did not attend a writers’ workshop.

Now it is 2010 and my writing goals are much the same:

• Write (at least) fifty-two poems this year
• Send out (at least) twelve packages
• Attend a writers’ workshop (I’m already registered for this one am applying to one very ambitious one and one slightly less ambitious one Stateside). 
• Continue to read, read, read. Read more, read more widely, read more critically, read more openly. Read more stuff I never thought I’d read. Read more stuff I’ve already read. Read more stuff I don’t like. Read.

My writing life had a good year. My writing life passed the test I had set up for myself: give it a year and if at the end of the year something from the year is still glimmering, then give it another year. And things are glimmering. I’ve published some pieces that I’m proud of, pieces I think I’ll still be proud to have my name attached to a year from now and a year from then. I’m reading more poetry, and that’s just good for a person’s heart. I’ve found a thing outside of me, outside of my small boys, that is hard and shiny and good. That is mine. This is me, now, this fresh-baked stumbling poet. Maybe not, as Bethany so perfectly put it, for a living, but for a life, yes. For a life, this stumbling poet is me, and I’ll take that.

Who wants to join in?

This too is why we moved here. It wasn’t just the boys who needed more space. It wasn’t just the boys who needed to be outside. It wasn’t just the boys who needed a place they could call their own, a yard and garden to get muddy in, to dig up and cultivate and experiment and make mistakes. It wasn’t just the boys who needed projects and jobs: hauling the wood to the wood pile, wheeling the weeds off to the compost in their wheel-barrows, weeding, digging rocks, planting bulbs. This too is why we moved here.

In the spring I will have rows in the garden. R’s mother has been keeping a farm garden for fifty years (longer; since she was old enough to help, I imagine) – lettuce and onions and beans and cauliflower; tomatoes and squash and zucchini – and in the spring I will have rows in the garden. (Small Boy is ahead of me on this – for the past two years he has had his own row of green beans that he has taken care of from planting through to plucking.) My mother-in-law is in her seventies now and cannot keep up with a large farm garden; she has been turning over more space to flowers, the raspberry canes have gotten out of control, and she cannot keep up with the weeding. She is more than happy to turn some rows over to me. I am new to all this and torn between diving in and planting many rows and moving more slowly. I want tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant and sweet peas. I do not know how to do any of this, but I have a farm wife, a farm wife who was before that a farm daughter, for a mother-in-law and that is better than having an entire shelf of gardening books. In the spring I will have rows in the garden.

We are digging. We are planting. We are growing.