Typical Day
Typical Day
Polly McPoetess gets up at 6:30AM, with a terrible taste in her mouth and a morbid intuition that the writing she managed to squeeze out the night before might actually be quite awful. She immediately brushes her teeth and attempts to forget about her growing pile of unreadable verse.
Once refreshed, she makes sure she's prepared for the Writing Composition 101 class she teaches at the local community college. She starts off her day with a yogurt and packs a sandwich for her lunch. Eating this cheaply helps save money for the times when she's not employed. This is poetry, after all, and she's not sure if she'll be asked back to teach again next semester.
Class starts at 8:00AM. Polly attempts to inject some semblance of poetic merit into the curriculum, but her efforts are met with the limpest enthusiasm imaginable. Some of the kids actually read the homework, which is helpful for two of the easier questions she poses, but mostly she just answers herself like a sad game of call-and-response.
Thankfully, her 10:00AM 400-level poetry theory class goes a lot better. The six brave souls who've signed up to take this advanced course actually want to be there. One of these days she'll make sure to learn all of their names. Polly's great with words, but names are another matter entirely.
During her lunch break at 12:30PM, Polly rushes to the campus post office to send out a dozen batches of submissions to literary magazines across the country that she hopes might enjoy her work.
She's been submitting poems twice weekly for the past two years, and once a small student-run publication from a neighboring community college even decided to publish one of her sonnets about love. Though it still bothers her that they included it in their Wild & Wacky section.
Once her full day of teaching classes has ended, she returns home to her three cats—Gus, Growltiger, and Old Deuteronomy—around 5:00PM. If she's lucky, her mailbox will contain a kindly-worded rejection letter like the ones she's been wallpapering her bedroom with for the past two years. Unfortunately, there's nothing in there but bills. She assumes her poems have once again been silently judged and dismissed.
Undaunted, Polly feeds her three cats and sits down with a mind-clearing cup of tea. After two hours of staring at the words "Love is like" on her notepad, she remembers she's supposed to eat dinner at some point.
She microwaves a can of soup around 7:00PM, but as she's waiting for it to finish heating, sudden inspiration smacks her like a ton of bricks. Polly rushes back to her notepad, and forty-five frantic minutes later she has ten pages on what love is like. She'll edit it later. It's now 7:45PM and her dinner is cold. She reheats her soup and turns on NPR.
Once in bed, Polly picks her notepad back up and begins to write again. The weight of her day spills forth, and she finally gets all of her emotions down on the paper. She falls asleep around 11:45PM, a full poem written on the notepad and an incredibly satisfied feeling inside.