Bad day, for no particular reason. Primera more difficult than usual.

Completely irrelevant thoughts: I like the Robert Lowell poem "Waking in the Blue" and I was thinking about the nature of confessional poetry and why the name always seemed a bad one. I don't think of the transgressive nature as being about the telling so much as about the content: what can I tell that has not been told before. And in fact most people don't know what a locked psych ward looks or feels like at daybreak. So okay, the poetry of voyeurism? Witness? Investigation? Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all. Accent on "all," not "tell."

Or maybe that's part of my own obsession with the "scoop" side of literature and its audience: who was the first to write an abolition novel? And to whom was she telling this story?