Monday, February 24th

A LOVELY SPRING rain slanting down … it seems that we had our whole winter in the first two weeks of February, and I feel a little deprived! A huge flock of evening grosbeaks is around now—they are winter residents but did not discover my feeders till a week ago. I found gentle Tamas happily tearing apart the bloody corpse of a gray squirrel which Bramble must have caught, as I had seen her with it under a bush. I forget how sharp and cruel their teeth are when it comes to their own natural life, they who are so gentle with me.

I agreed last summer to be an adviser to two women working for PhD’s in Union Graduate School. This is a plan whereby students can work wherever they are, meeting their advisers once a year for a week’s discussion. Norma is working on personal journals and keeping one as she goes along. Karen is trying to get at a deeper analysis of women through myth. (She began with Medusa and Athene.) Every now and then, without warning, their work in progress arrives. I spent two days last week on Norma’s. It has led me to think a good deal more than I ever have about what keeping a journal is like and what it demands of the writer. I do not believe that keeping a journal is for the young. There is always the danger of bending over oneself like Narcissus and drowning in self-indulgence. If a journal is to have any value either for the writer or any potential reader, the writer must be able to be objective about what he experiences on the pulse. For the whole point of a journal is this seizing events on the wing. Yet the substance will come not from narration but from the examination of experience, and an attempt, at least, to reduce it to essence. Secondly—and this is curious—what delights the reader in a journal is often minute particulars. Very few young people observe anything except themselves very closely. Then the context—by that I mean all that one brings to an experience of reading and thinking and feeling—is apt to be thin for the young. And, to get to the nub, I guess what I am suggesting is that rarely is there enough of a self there.

Norma wants to, and has already written a lot, on what she calls “Journal in Retrospect” to accompany her daily journal. (Incidentally I don’t believe one can write every day) and we are having a hassle over defining the terms. I feel there is a huge difference between autobiography (which her “Journal in Retrospect” is) and the journal. Autobiography is the story of a life or a childhood written, summoned back, long after its events took place. Autobiography is “what I remember,” whereas a journal has to do with “what I am now, at this instant.” I hope Norma can find a way to intertwine the two. Often a present experience brings back something out of the past which is suddenly seen in a new light. That, I think, works.

Besides all this, last week also brought pages and pages of the bibliography of my work that Lenora Blouin has been working on for over a year. I must check it and am slowly unwrapping little magazines and anthologies that have not been unpacked since I moved. It is rather amusing to do all this, but not when I am quite as harried by other things as I am now.

My first lecture is on Thursday at the University of New Hampshire. They want discussion afterward on what it is like to be a woman poet. So off we go again! I must put everything together this morning.