At the end of tomorrow, my life will seem much simpler, even though I’ll still have a major paper left to write on Daniel Deronda. Tonight I hand in one final paper, tomorrow another. Plus I get to go to a poetry reading tomorrow night at the Library of Congress. (Mark Strand and Charles Wright. When I went to the Adelaide Writers’ Festival in 2002, Mark Strand had had to cancel: now I get to see him.) There’s also a reading this weekend at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. So, while I’ll still be working on the final touches of the semester, I’m really pleased that I’ll be able to transition into thinking more exclusively about poetry. I just spent the morning writing about Pound’s first canto—of, duh!, The Cantos, and it was an oddly pleasurable experience. Perhaps because it gave me a chance to revisit all his absolute statements in The ABC of Reading, which—as well as finding admonishing and inspiring as well—I always find quite amusing. Homer is not to be translated. Go out and learn Ancient Greek, philistine, or you will never truly understand his greatness!

I’m hoping at the end of classes my late nights will come to an end, and I will get onto something like normal hours. It’s strange to me to suddenly be a night owl.

ANZAC day in two days time. I wonder if I should convince someone to have a dawn observance of the fact with me? At least the weather here is lovely. Dawn might not seem quite so cruel if the weather is still nice… I haven’t heard anything from the Centre of Australian and New Zealand Studies here (it’s our centre, so I’m spelling it our way, in spite of Georgetown… this spelling malarky gets complicated sometimes). Normally they have a ANZAC lecture that is the centrepiece of their yearly events—last year, for instance, Thomas Keneally gave it. There is meant to be a talk by a New Zealander this year—but no word. I checked their website, and nothing there either. Still, the Australian and New Zealand Embassies have organised a Dawn Service at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. I’ll just have to drag myself out of bed!

I've been feeling a little homesick today - though I'm not sure where I locate that homesickness. I'm both homesick for Australia, but also for poetry. The scraps I've been writing feel like a salvation - and while I'm writing them, I feel like I'm creating something strong. It's that rapture of concentration. But I'm finding often I have trouble gaining perspective on what I've written, because somehow being in a different country, my poetry has a different life. I wrote a poem in short sections recently - I don't like to say fragments, because really they were each fully formed (as best I can currently do, that is) - and when I was discussing it with some people today, they told me (after some discussion) that they were confused by the word "dam": in the US, it doesn't refer to the gigantic, muddy puddles that I remember from home. "Oh, ditches," they said. Yet, the poem can't change. Can I be read here?

I've been remedying homesickness by reading Nicolas Rothwell's book Another Country. Even though I'm reading about Central Australia - because it's a place I've never been, instead in my head I'm thinking about the landscapes between Cowra and Dubbo - the parts of the "country" that I do know. But, too, it's teaching me about the regions that I haven't felt emotionally able to come at before: somehow the centre was always too vast. But now my absence is, I guess, vaster. I get so busy that it takes time for me to remember I need space to think about home.

A friend - Kevin Rabalais - is launching his first book, the novel The Landscape of Desire in Melbourne at the end of this month. I wish I could be there (I'm hoping to get a copy fairly soon after the launch, and perhaps I can spend part of the Easter weekend reading it. For those of you who are in Melbourne, the launch is on 28 February at The Avenue bookstore in Albert Park. The book is being launched by Alex Miller. I've known Kevin for a few years now, and I'm so excited to see his book becoming a reality. He and his partner Jennifer Levasseur are, among my friends, two of those most dedicated to the craft of writing.