Apologies for the late newsletter. I went to write it this morning at the coffee shop and got paged for an incident. Ugh. Software.
This week, I took a rough cut at what my manuscript could be. Tomás Q. Morín, who facilitated my poetry cohort at Bread Loaf gave me an idea. Get 100 poems, taking the first and last lines of every poem (no titles) and put them in a single document. Print the document out. Cut the lines of each poem into strips. See where a poem ends and where it begins and figure out if you can put it together like a mixtape. See if the last poem echoes the first poem. Check how the first and last poems of your sections flow together. So I did that.
You'll have leftovers, he said. And I did. Finally, order your manuscript and see how it feels. And then I did that.
It's too long, but that's a good problem to have. First time I printed it, it was 98 pages. Probably needs to be no more than 65. But this means I can be ruthless about what stays and what goes. And I'll have a better idea of where the holes are, opportunities to write poems that fit directly into those holes.
Regardless, I'm going to get it into shape to submit this year for full manuscript consideration. I hardly think anyone is going to pick it up, but I could keep writing poems forever and I really do think this manuscript is saying something. I think it needs to exist in the world. So I need to figure out what to do to get it into the world. Nothing like feedback, I guess.
