One of my post-exam goals is to try to take a couple of weeks to do some serious poetry-work before getting deep into my dissertation. I can't believe this, but it's been over a year since I've sent out submissions, so it's time to get out the ol' SASE operation again.
I'm also trying to figure out how to get beyond the one-poem-at-a-time paradigm, and after literally years of having no idea how to transform my (ever-growing and increasingly-unwieldy) pile of poems into a manuscript with shape, today I decided to take the empirical approach. So I sat down with all the print-outs of poems I could find, and just started sorting. At first, there was no principle other than what felt right. Pretty quickly I realized that I was making sections with a nice combination of direct and oblique approaches to a recognizable (I hope) general theme. I don't know if it would feel that way to anyone other than me, but it was kind of exciting still to feel a larger work taking shape. I was kind of surprised, too, at what the sections turned out to be. The working headings (not to be part of the book itself) are a funny mismatch of different kinds of topics:
1. History
2. Family
3. Boats
4. China
5. Evil
6. California
1 comment:
I like that you've placed California right after the section on Evil. Very sneaky, lady. ;)
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