I live in an old cottage on a run-down but still working farm at the western border of New Jersey, on the Delaware River, only a few miles north of where Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day, 1776. I live here with my wife and son. We’re hemmed in by parkland and forest, by the trees going up at the margins of the house, and we quite enjoy it. I am by both calling and accident a poet and a scholar of American poetry, particularly the 19th through the early 20th centuries. I teach writing at Rutgers University while searching futilely, several years now, for a tenure-track position in American literature. I enjoy the teaching, but it’s not sustainable, to use a contemporary idiom. Neither is our domestic arrangement: the farm has been for sale for years now and eventually someone’s going to buy it, and the cottage is rundown and tiny – we’re going to outgrow it in two years or so.
I’ve started this blog to write about our experiences here at the edge of the wilderness in the far reaches of what is the nation’s most densely populated state and my efforts to find a professional niche that combines my love of teaching and my obsessions with language and ideas. I find that despite the fact that I teach writing, and that I got into this literary academic bag because I love to write, I myself am writing very, very little. In addition to the blog, I’ve also decided to start learning the craft of songwriting, so my reflections on that will also likely appear, once I actually get the nerve to work something up rather than beat around its bush. I imagine the blog will change as things change, especially given its goal – the record of an eventual and necessary if unforeseeable transformation.
