What's She Doing? Plus AWAD

Just for the benefit of those of you that weren't in workshop with me last year: The drawings I've been doing are illustrations of lines of from poems. Somebody, Marvel Stove I think, had the idea of starting a t-shirt company that would specialize in t-shirts with that sort of design on them. The snowman is from the Wallace Stevens poem "The Snow Man" and the monkey is from Ezra Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (which is a loose traslation of a classical Chinese poem) and the nightingale is from the Keats ode. I don't know if it was an actual company idea, that is, I don't know how serious an idea it was. It was mostly inspired by the fact that we were all always drawing little doodles on our copies of each other's poems, and on the poems we read for seminars, and the pleasnat insiderishness of having an obscure bit of poetry accompanied by a cute drawing on a t-shirt. (Marvel Stove, by the way, is a blogger-name that comes from Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina") Anyway, that's what's up with that.

AWAD is A Word A Day, which sends me a word a day in my e-mail. Usually I know the word, but today it was "sounder" which is what one calls a group of boars. This week they're all going to be the more obscure animal group names. Did you know a group of ducks in the water is called a paddling, but when they're flying one must call them a team? I love specificity like that, the devotion to a subject that it displays. Someone, I think George Orwell, said that there's really no such thing as a synonym, that there is just one exactly right word for every thing.