January 30

By now I've worked out the kink in my right calf from springing out of bed to answer the phone. I knew it would be my daughter, Lucy, just arriving in Paris. The poor soul had to carry her bags to the 4th floor of a friend's apartment twice before she figured out which suite was his but she made it.

Picked up a set of essays today on the general topic of what a poem can do, using the poems we'd read as examples. And then assigned the next essay: tell your life story using four incidents involving animals. Informal writing this time, obviously. I'll have to convince these first-year students that even the most ordinary stories they can imagine are in fact loaded with material, if they can commit to going after it. Such switching of gears from a formal essay to something else is not popular with all students. It's just another thing they have to learn, is how they might see it. But the rewards are great, I keep saying.