Some things on my mind before we dive in:
- My latest review on Hazel & Wren is of Rebecca Dunham’s Glass Armonica (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
- The New Shit Show was a huge success! Thanks to Hannah Holman and Megan Clark who performed my new piece with me, and thanks to Lewis Mundt who asked me to perform. The next installment of the New Shit Show is on Friday, May 16th.
- Moving is a terrible thing (for me). I love my new apartment and I’m happy to be here, but packing and unpacking is tedious, and getting a new apartment set up is expensive and involves shopping (which I don’t like under normal circumstances). I should be feeling mostly normal by June.
- I’m traveling to St. Louis for work at the end of the month. I don’t love traveling, but I do sleep really well in hotel rooms. Perhaps it’s just that I typically work at least ten hours a day when I travel for work. Either way, I expect I’ll get a lot of reading done.
Something that I think would be interesting is to give a short update on my manuscript-in-progress in these blog posts. Some writers are superstitious about talking about a work in progress until it's done—I've felt that impulse myself. For some reason, though, talking about this manuscript in general (not poems in particular) has felt "safe." Maybe it's simply that it feels real. I have a folder of drafts that will soon get split into several folders (one for each section's fragments and incomplete drafts, plus one for revised drafts) and the folder has weight to it.
A little background: the poems that really started this project began to take shape in January 2013, though some of the poems that have found their way in were written earlier and have been re-purposed. The shape of the manuscript really began to come together in August of 2013 and my work now is writing into that arc.
So where’s it at right now? It’s hard to say. My goal has been to have a 60-70-page draft completed by the end of July. An arbitrary timeline, but it's provided some structure for me. Moving has slowed me down considerably, but I still feel confident that I can meet my goal. Of course there will be quite a bit of revision to do at that point, but the work will transition from being generative work to work sculpting the raw material. Currently I have about 20 relatively polished pages, and another 20 mostly unpolished draft pages.
So what’s next? Writing a lot more, naturally. I have fragments and ideas for dozens more poems and have been chipping away at them as I can in between packing and unpacking. I’m beginning to carve out time to write again and poems are starting to click. I hope that next month I can write of more complete drafts and a higher percentage of revised pages.
For now I’ll continue slowly settling into my new space and hope that these new digs mean great things for my writing life. Is there anything you're interested in knowing about the process of putting this collection of poems together?
A little background: the poems that really started this project began to take shape in January 2013, though some of the poems that have found their way in were written earlier and have been re-purposed. The shape of the manuscript really began to come together in August of 2013 and my work now is writing into that arc.
So where’s it at right now? It’s hard to say. My goal has been to have a 60-70-page draft completed by the end of July. An arbitrary timeline, but it's provided some structure for me. Moving has slowed me down considerably, but I still feel confident that I can meet my goal. Of course there will be quite a bit of revision to do at that point, but the work will transition from being generative work to work sculpting the raw material. Currently I have about 20 relatively polished pages, and another 20 mostly unpolished draft pages.
So what’s next? Writing a lot more, naturally. I have fragments and ideas for dozens more poems and have been chipping away at them as I can in between packing and unpacking. I’m beginning to carve out time to write again and poems are starting to click. I hope that next month I can write of more complete drafts and a higher percentage of revised pages.
For now I’ll continue slowly settling into my new space and hope that these new digs mean great things for my writing life. Is there anything you're interested in knowing about the process of putting this collection of poems together?
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