2 p.m. Meet with thesis student to discuss new poems and a lyric essay.

4:30 p.m. Meet with Helena, a thesis student in literary translation. Because I don’t speak the languages she’s translating from (German, French and Flemish), what we mostly discuss are the choices she’s made in English — areas where the language feels stiff, overly taxed or unclear. I’m urging her to bring her literal translations into a more vivid and robust English. It’s a process that requires listening to the work out loud, and deciding on subtle shifts in tone and emphasis. I’m currently co-translating a Chinese poet’s work into English, and so I have a lot of investment in how this process is going for Helena.

9 p.m. Bedtime with boys. No school tomorrow, so everyone stayed up a little later than usual.

12:15 a.m. I need to pack for a trip to Yale tomorrow — I’ve been invited to the Yale Divinity School to read.

5:50 a.m. Up early to catch a train to New Haven.

7:20 a.m. I find a seat on the train and send a few delinquent emails. I spend most of the ride revisiting parts of “My Bright Abyss,” by Christian Wiman, who’ll be my host at Yale. I mark a passage in which Wiman quotes the last words of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.”

11:30 a.m. We attend chapel services at the Divinity School. It is mostly exquisite and moving song, but Chris speaks briefly about my visit. After a tear-inducingly powerful version of the gospel song “Wade in the Water,” it is my turn to read a poem. I was planning to read something else, but I decide to read my own poem of the same title.

1:30 p.m. We head to campus for Chris’s undergraduate English class on poetry and faith. The students have a great many questions about my poem and collection “Wade in the Water.” They want to talk about the sense of the holy that the book seeks to conjure, and how I’m consciously drawing upon the traditional spiritual of the same title. I’m thoroughly moved and impressed by the thought they’ve brought to the reading of my poems.

5 p.m. We head to the English department building for my reading. I’ve read in this room before, several years ago. This time it is too small. Students line the aisles, and a group is clustered in the hall. Because of the shooting in California, I open with an excerpt from “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected,” a poem written in response to a series of hate crimes from the spring of 2009. The poem helped me to recognize that this is an American problem, something we must view as an extension of something alive at the center of our culture rather than something at its fringes.

7:45 a.m. Ride to Union Station and catch the 8:39 to Trenton. On the train ride, I watch “A Question of Silence,” a 1982 Dutch film about three women who are strangers to one another but commit a crime together. My friend and collaborator, the composer Greg Spears, wants to discuss the film today over lunch.



By ALEXANDRA ALTER

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