Got some very exciting poetry news recently, which I should be able to share later this month.
I haven’t been blogging like I thought I might, since quitting FB in March.
I have, however, been writing a lot more, at work on my book-length poem. It’s undergone a massive reorganization, which it needed, and I spent several weeks this summer getting all the notes for unwritten portions into one master Scrivener file, and lately I’ve been writing new pieces for it again. The Book as Lyric Experiment panel we did at &NOW was helpful—hearing Jennifer (Firestone), Emily (Carr), & Catie (Rosemurgy) talk about and read from their projects was illuminating, and articulating my own process and how this poem is different from my other work was too. That has been the bulk of my learning curve—how to sustain the energy and spin out the narrative structure. It’s taken a lot more behind the scenes organization than I am used to building, to keep it from wandering off. (I let the short poems generally wander where they like, having no plan at all beforehand, usually.)
It turns out it’s not unusual for a long-form project to take this long, they said. And each of them works only this way, vs. writing shorter standalone poems, so they would know. The first pieces are 2009, and I realized it was going to be a long-form thing at some point in 2010. The first “complete draft,” which of course was not complete, was “done” in 2012. And here I am still writing it. I can see the end from here though, this time. It’s a much better (and weirder) book than it was in that first awkward draft. I’ve been reading from it some too, most recently last month at KGB.
I have some of the shorter poems forthcoming in the meantime—Shock of the Femme, Bone Bouquet, Bennington Review, Oversound, the Couter-Desecrations anthology. I’ll post about those and the aforementioned Big News as things pop into the open.
Most of my leisure reading has been in service to this poem too, but not all. Right now I’m reading this, which is terrific. (Just like everything I’ve read from Dorothy so far.)
This poem by Rosmarie Waldrop is the most exquisite thing I experienced this week.
Followed by this rainy river view last night.
O, what’s this? I think I have blogged!