Thinking in Groups
Not group-think, but different.
I’ve been thinking about the poems in this new manuscript, and how they fit into “sets,” not quite like a set list that I would prepare for a reading, but more like a playlist from my ipod. Poems that echo about each other even after you’ve gone past them, and some that are “signature”–sounding sort of the same as another one that came pages before. It’s easy to want to write more that fit this to try to fill in the holes that seem apparent in the manuscript, but I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. It’s like writing a commission poem… mechanically it would work fine, but it wouldn’t do what the book, or the poems around it, need it to do. Or what I need the poems to do.
I think this is sort of the problem I faced (and hope I’ve resolved) with Little Oblivion. And the problem I want to resolve in the third, so far useless except for having given me a very good time when I needed one in my life, manuscript. With that one–and I don’t even have a working title for it–I wrote poems all circulating around two primary male characters. Some would say caricatures of male characters. But what I was trying to get to is how complex these two people could be (both fictitious, by the way) in their relationship with each other and those around them–and how that complexity translated into things like airports, house porches during autumn, camping trips, tampon machines, family holidays, etc. The everyday. I haven’t given up on this manuscript, but it needs a drastic makeover. Maybe I should just let it go for what it was–which was amazingly fun to write. I wrote it mostly ten years ago during my year in and out of Antarctica. It was the distraction I needed from my life and its complexities at the time, and from Antarctica, which was being a bitch about letting me write about it.
But first thing’s first… this new one is hot for me, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Or carrying it with me every day. With all that’s going on right now–spending time with my father in law and the family as much as possible, dog with a tumor that has to be removed, new work and work schedule, and attempting to get the house ready for the market–it’s hard to find time to sit with it. It’s not screaming at me yet, so I’m still good thinking about it in the ways I am right now. Soon, I won’t be able to do that.
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I wrote my first query letter to send my manuscript out.
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Apparently, today we’ll be attempting to:
1. bake an apple-and-strawberry-and-creme (translated from “milk”) pie
2. bake a macaroni-and-cheese-and-hot-dog pie
3. decorate the ‘plain’ shirts I bought for Claire, because she doesn’t like shirts without pictures on them.
All while up at the in-laws’ house. I think we will need a bit of luck for this endeavor. And maybe some Pepto-Bismol.